KELVIN IN THE SIXTIES 261 



This class consisted mainly of divinity, medical and law students, 

 who, of course, should have been taught the elements of natural phi- 

 losophy by some assistant provided by the university. To waste the 

 time, energy and extraordinary original power of a genius like Thom- 

 son on such teaching was like using a razor- to chop firewood. The 

 junior clerks in Downing Street require instruction, but the prime 

 minister is not expected to personally hold daily classes for them. And 

 yet, during the past eighty years, there have been many prime ministers, 

 but only one William Thomson. 



But to those, like myself, who, after receiving some scientific train- 

 ing, had come from other countries to hear Thomson's talks, his sug- 

 gestions, his buoyancy, were like the rays of brilliant May sunshine fol- 

 lowing April showers. The ideas of those students sprouted as never 

 had they done before. The more thoughful gazed with eyes of wonder 

 at Thomson developing an original paper during a lecture on any- 

 thing that he might be talking about, we knowing that any notes or 

 calculations that he might previously have made were on the back of 

 some old envelope and left probably with his great-coat in the hall. 

 " If you want to know what's in books go and read them for yourselves. 

 I am telling you what is not in books," he used to remark at those 

 lectures at the old University of Glasgow (now a railway goods station), 

 the " Academia Glasgnana," founded by a bull of Pope Nicholas V., 

 and built on the east side of the High Street in 1450 under the au- 

 thority of Gulielmus Turnbull, Bishop of Glasgow. 



The present university did not exist in my student days ; in fact the 

 classic stream Kelvin, although beginning to show signs of the drainage 

 from manufactories spreading to the northwest of the city, flowed 

 through a park and a dale still of a sufficiently sylvan character to 

 make the words of the old song, " Oh ! let us haste to Kelvin grove," 

 not absolutely inapplicable. 



To my question, " What books on electricity shall I read ? " he 

 replied " None ! there are none. But you might read some of my 

 papers in the Philosophical Magazine." Clerk Maxwell's classical 

 treatise, Fleeming Jenkin's " Electricity and Magnetism," and the 

 reprint of Thomson's own papers did not appear until some years 

 afterwards. Fleeming Jenkin, who with Cromwell Varley became a 

 partner in that famous firm of consulting telegraph engineers, " Thom- 

 son, Varley and Jenkin," was the first person to write a text-book which 

 brought together disconnected and disjointed experiments and gave the 

 elementary mathematical theory underlying them. In the preface of 

 this book, which first appeared in 1873, the author said: 



In England at the present time it may almost be said there ara two sciences 

 of electricity — one that is taught in the ordinary text-books, and the other a 

 sort of floating science known more or less perfectly to practical electricians 

 and expressed in a fragmentary manner in papers by Faraday, Thomson, Max- 



