THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



187 



THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



LORD KELVIN 



The tomb of William Thomson, 

 Baron Kelvin of Largs, now stands 

 beside that of Darwin in Westminster 

 Abbey, and a great epoch in history is 

 closed. The nineteenth century will 

 remain preeminent for the supremacy 

 of science and for the advance of in- 

 dustrial democracy. Great Britain 

 more than any other nation has led 

 these movements, and no other of its 

 great men so completely typifies them 

 as he who ranged from cosmic specula- 

 tions to industrial inventions, who 

 brought together mathematical physics 

 and practical engineering. 



While Kelvin retained to the age of 

 eighty-three years much of the vigor, 

 keenness and intellectual curiosity of 

 youth, he belongs in a sense to the 

 middle of the nineteenth century rather 

 than to the more complicated period of 



its close. For the grandson of an Irish 

 peasant farmer to amass great wealth, 

 discard his plebian name and take a 

 seat in the house of lords is a social 

 ideal of the earlier rather than of the 

 later democracy. So Kelvin's science 

 was static of the forties. He liked 

 models that he could visualize; he did 

 not care for the doctrine of evolution; 

 even in his own field the researches of 

 I others did not greatly affect him. This 

 is perhaps typical of genius, especially 

 mathematical genius, which seems to 

 develop early, to be likely to be hered- 

 itary and to be comparatively unaf- 

 fected by external conditions. 



Kelvin's father, without early oppor- 

 tunities, became professor of mathe- 

 matics in Glasgow University, and his 

 brother was professor of engineering 

 there. Kelvin was appointed to the 

 chair of natural philosophy at the age 



Lord Kelvin, 

 then William Thomson, at the age of twenty-two, when just elected to the Chair of Natural 



Philosophy at Glasgow. 



