37-1 JOSEPH LOVERING. 



Institution of Boston, and one or more lectures in many towns 

 and cities of New England. 



The wonderful clearness and elegance of exposition so conspicu- 

 ous in Professor Lovering's lectures appeared also in his mono- 

 graphs and popular essays on scientific subjects. These are very 

 numerous, and are models of scientific style. They are scattered 

 through various serial publications, and are probably known to but 

 few of the present generation ; but they represent his very best 

 work, and in justice to his memory they ought to be collected and 

 reprinted. Besides their intrinsic value as the literary work of a 

 very successful teacher, they are valuable material for the history of 

 science. Professor Lovering's long career covers a period of won- 

 derful development in all departments of physics, not simply in 

 the discovery of new facts, but also in the change of aspect under 

 which the old facts are regarded. Our late colleague was a broad 

 scholar, not only familiar with the past history of every branch of 

 his subject, but also accustomed to look at facts from all sides. If 

 a student who had fallen into the rut of a system went to him 

 with a difficulty, — perhaps insuperable on that theory, — he would 

 surmount the difficulty by taking the man out of the rut, and thus 

 enabling him to look at the facts from a different point of view. 

 How different would be our judgment of the alternating phases 

 in the past history of science, — of the labors of the alchemists, for 

 example, — if we could only see the facts as our fathers necessarily 

 regarded them ; and the most striking feature of Professor Lovering's 

 essays is the circumstance that the point of view from which lie 

 writes is made so clear. Moreover, a comparison of the earlier 

 essays with the later shows how the point of view changed, and 

 that the author, acute scholar as he was, had closely followed the 

 change. 



The following contemporary notices fully justify the writer's 

 estimate of these occasional essays, which are enumerated in the 

 catalogue of his publications at the end of this notice. A scholar 

 of high scientific eminence has recently written of these essays, 

 that they impressed him as few others had ever done. "It will 

 surprise him to know it ; yet it is true that the ideas then pre- 

 sented, and with an elegance worthy of their breadth and power, 

 affected the whole tenor and tendency of my thoughts, and thus of 

 my subsequent life." And he compares the style of parts of them 

 with that of the most classic passages in Babbage's Ninth Bridge- 

 water Treatise. 



