SKETCH OF WILLIAM EDWARD WEBER. 549 



William. Ernest was a believer iu the supreme right of kings, 

 and set aside the Constitution which William had granted in 

 1833. At the same time he called on the public officers of the 

 country, including the professors in the university, to take an 

 oath of allegiance to him and of obedience to his new rule. Weber 

 with six of his fellow-professors — Jacob and William Grimm, 

 Dahlmann, Albrecht, Gervinus, and Ewald — protested against 

 the arbitrary act, and refused to conform to it. " The entire effect 

 of our work," they said, " depends not more surely on the scien- 

 tific value of our teaching than on our personal freedom from 

 reproach. So soon as we appear before the students as men who 

 trifle with their oaths, our efficiency is at an end. And what 

 would the oath of our fidelity and homage be worth to his Majesty 

 the King, if it came from men who had just frivolously set aside 

 another sworn obligation ? " For this refusal the seven professors 

 — " the Gottingen seven " they are called — were removed from 

 their chairs, and three of them (Gervinus, Dahlmann, and Jacob 

 Grimm) were expelled from the country. After this event 

 Weber lived in retirement as a private teacher in Gottingen till 

 1843, when he was called to be Professor of Physics in the Uni- 

 versity of Leipsic. According to a German biographer, he never 

 felt quite at home in Leipsic, and gladly accepted an invitation 

 in 1849 to his old place in the Georgia Augusta at Gottingen, 

 where he spent the rest of his life, " with rare fullness of enjoy- 

 ment pursuing his learned work, never anxious about the show of 

 success, but finding complete satisfaction in the peculiar joys of 

 scientific achievement, furnishing thus a shining example in op- 

 position to the restlessness of our age." 



With his eldest brother, Ernst Heinrich, who, a physician, 

 with particular devotion to anatomy and physiology, had become 

 interested in the solution of certain difficult questions in physics, 

 Weber engaged in the investigation of some of the phenomena of 

 wave -motion. The result was the publication, in 1825, when 

 Weber was twenty-one years old, of the book T>ie Wellenlehre 

 auf Experimente gegrundet (The Doctrine of Waves, based on 

 Experiments), a volume of five hundred and seventy-four pages, 

 with eighteen copper plates, mostly engraved by the authors. One 

 of the striking results of the investigations was the discovery 

 that, when a regular series of waves follow each other along the 

 surface of water, the particles at the surface describe vertical cir- 

 cles, the plane of which is parallel to the direction of propagation 

 of the waves, and those lower down ellipses, of which the vertical 

 axis becomes smaller and smaller with increasing depth. The 

 work was, according to the declaration of the authors, the re- 

 sult of such constant and intimate communication between them 

 with regard to all the parts that it was impossible to assign 



