TEKKESTEIAL MAG^^ETISM.i 



By Prof. A. W. Eucker, M.A.,F.E.S. 



. It is impossible for a body of English scientific men to meet in one 

 of our ancient university towns without contrasting the old ideal of 

 the pursuit of learning for its own sake with the modern conception 

 of the organization of science as part of a pushing business concern. 



We are, as a nation, convinced that education is essential to national 

 success. Our modern universities are within earshot of the whirr of 

 the cotton mill or the roar of Piccadill}^ Oxford and Cambridge them- 

 selves are not content to be centers of attraction to which scholars 

 gravitate, Tliey have devised schemes by which their influence is 

 directly exerted on every market town and almost on every village in 

 the country. University extension is but a part of the extraordinary 

 multiplication of the machinery of education which is going on all 

 around us. The British Association, which was once regarded as 

 bringing light into dark places, is now welcomed in every large provin- 

 cial town by a group of well-known men of science; and w^e find ready 

 for the meetings of our sections, not onlj' the chapels and concert rooms 

 which have so often and so kindly been placed at our disposal, but all 

 the appliances of well-designed lecture rooms and laboratories. 



I do not propose, however, to detain you this morning with a dis- 

 course on the spread of scientific education, but you will forgive me if 

 I illustrate its i^rogress by two facts, not perhaps the most striking 

 which could be selected, but especially appropriate to our j)lace of 

 meeting. It is little more than thirty years since the two branches of 

 science with which our section deals, mathematics and physics, have 

 been generally recognized as wide enough to require more than one 

 teacher to cope with them in an educational institution of high preten- 

 sions and achievement. In 18(50 the authorities of the Owens College, 

 Manchester, debated whether it was desirable to create a professorship 

 of natural philosophy in addition to, and independent of, the chair of 



' Address as president of section of mathematics and pliysics at meeting of British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford meeting, 1894. Printed by the 

 Association ; also in Nature, No. 1293, Vol. L. 



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