SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



327 



SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS. 



The memoirs presented to the Cam- 

 bridge Philosophical Society on the oc- 

 casion of the jubilee of Sir George 

 Stokes, have been published in a stately 

 volume by the Cambridge University 

 Press. A year ago some four hundred 

 men of science met at Cambridge to cel- 

 ebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the ap- 

 pointment of Sir George Stokes to the 

 Lucasian professorship of mathematics, 

 a chair held by Newton and a distin- 

 guished line of mathematicians. An of- 

 ficial account of the proceedings, with 

 a portrait of Professor Stokes, is given 

 in the volume now issued. The seventy- 

 two institutions sending delegates are 

 arranged chronologically in the order 

 of their foundation, and it is not un- 

 worthy of note that among the sixteen 

 oldest institutions, the United States 

 has five representatives, whereas Great 

 Britain has thirteen universities and col- 

 leges younger than the Johns Hopkins 

 University. The Rede lecture given by 

 M. Alfred Cornu and entitled 'La the- 

 orie des ondes lumineuses,' is published 

 in French, even the quotations from 

 Newton's 'Opticks' being translated into 

 that language. M. Cornu states that by 

 'une etude approfondie' of the 'Opticks,' 

 his lecture shows that Newton favored 

 Descartes's undulatory theory of light, 

 rather than the emission theory usually 

 attributed to him. The twenty-two 

 memoirs that follow cover a wide range 

 of subjects, nearly all of which have, 

 however, a connection with the re- 

 searches of Professor Stokes. They in- 

 clude three contributions from the 

 United States, mathematical papers by 

 Profs. E. W. Brown and E. O. Lovett, 

 and a description by Professor Michel- 

 son of his echelon spectroscope. 



In addition to this memorial vol- 

 ume, the Cambridge University Press, 



which is represented in America by 

 The Macmillan Company, is at pres- 

 ent publishing the collected papers of 

 three eminent students of mathemat- 

 ical physics. The first volume of Lord 

 Rayleigh's 'Scientific Papers' contains 

 seventy-eight contributions published 

 from 1869 to 1881. The early papers show 

 the influence of Maxwell, Lord Bay- 

 leigh's predecessor in the chair of exper- 

 imental physics at Cambridge, but it 

 was apparently not until 1881 that he 

 fully appreciated the importance of 

 Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory of 

 light. The papers on acoustics were fol- 

 lowed by the publication in 1877 of the 

 classical work on the 'Theory of Sound.' 

 Lord Rayleigh, at an early period, 

 treated various optical subjects, includ- 

 ing some of the phenomena of color vis- 

 ion. His explanation of the blue color 

 of the sky and his treatment of the 

 resolving power of telescopes are well 

 known. The contributions on optics and 

 acoustics have been continued to the 

 present time, but they by no means 

 limit his interests. There are important 

 papers on hydrodynamics and mathe- 

 matics, and longer and shorter contribu- 

 tions on a great range of subjects in 

 mathematical physics, the science which 

 at the present day is perhaps of supreme 

 importance. 



The second volume of Professor 

 Tait's 'Scientific Papers' contains those 

 published since 1881. The first volume 

 consisted of sixty papers, and this vol- 

 ume, which has followed with but little 

 delay, adds seventy-three. As must be 

 the case in collected papers, some are 

 elaborate treatises while others fill only 

 part of a single page; some are ex- 

 tremely technical while others were first 

 published in the 'Encyclopaedia Britan- 

 nica' and the 'Contemporary Review.' 

 Among the more elaborate papers are 



