204 Professor Joseph Larmor [May 1, 



effective discoverer. His power lay more ia the direct scrutiny of 

 physical activity, the immediate grasp of connecting principles and 

 relations ; each subject that he tackled was transformed by direct 

 hints and analogies, brought to bear from profound contemplation of 

 the related domains of knowledge. In the first half of his life, 

 fundamental results arrived in such volume as often to leave behind 

 all chance of effective development. In the midst of such accumula- 

 tions he became a bad expositor : it is only by tracing his activity up 

 and down through its fragmentary published records, and thus 

 obtaining a consecutive view of his occupation, that a just idea of 

 the vistas continually opening upon him may be reached. Nowhere 

 is the supremacy of intellect more impressively illustrated. One is at 

 times almost tempted to wish that the electric cabling of the Atlantic, 

 his popularly best known achievement, as it was one of the most 

 strenuous, had never been undertaken by him ; nor even, perhaps, the 

 practical settlement of electric units and instruments and methods to 

 which it led on, thus leaving the ground largely prepared for the 

 modern refined electric transformation of general engineering. In 

 the absence of such pressing and absorbing distractions, what might 

 the world not have received during the years of his prime in new 

 discoveries and explorations among the inner processes of nature ? 



His scientific papers, mostly mere fragments, which overflowed 

 from his mind, as has been said, into the nearest channel of publica- 

 tion, have been collected by himself up to the year 1860, in somewhat 

 desultory manner, in four substantial volumes. In addition there 

 are three volumes of Popular Lectures and Addresses, which are more 

 finished products, perhaps equalled in weight and scope only by those 

 of Helmholtz. His fertility, especially in the first dozen years from 

 1845 to 1856, seems to be almost without precedent. Owing to the 

 want of systematic exposition, much of this progress was grasped only 

 imperfectly by contemporaries, and even long afterwards ; but the close 

 attention of a few master minds, including Clerk Maxwell, and in a 

 less degree Helmholtz, and in certain respects that of the school of 

 scientific electrical engineers that was rising into confident power 

 under his own inspiration, made up partially for this failure. In the 

 writings on Thermodynamics and the Theory of Available Energy, 

 this lack of consecutive arrangement has remained until the present 

 time a serious obstacle. In the notice * of the first two volumes of 

 the ' Collected Papers,' which was contributed to ' Nature ' in 1885 

 by Helmholtz, the writer was so engrossed by this interesting ei)isode 

 as to devote nearly the whole review to its consideration ; but even he 

 has missed recognising that Thomson's " dissipation of energy " was 

 in 1855 determined quantitatively just as much as Clausius' "entropy" 

 w^as in the same month of the same year, and was, moreover, even then 

 as wide in scope, making due allowance for the almost total absence 



Nature, xxxii. (1885), pp. 25-7; Helmholtz's Papers, iii. p. 593. 



