CHAPTER I 

 MEMOIR 



PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



OF all human activities and developments none are more characteristic 

 of the Victorian Era than those clustering round the word Science. Scientific 

 theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand 

 in hand. On the one side are the developments of steam power, and the 

 practical creations of Electric Telegraphy, Telephony and Dynamo-electric 

 machinery ; on the other the framing of new theories of Heat and Electricity. 

 Practical engineers and scientific men of all types and degrees of ability 

 and talent have had their share in this great development, which within 

 two generations has transformed the whole aspect of human life. 

 i> But of far greater import to the philosophical student than the dove- 

 tailed features of this development is the apprehension of the broad principle 

 of Energy which has unified the various branches of science. The biography 

 of any of the outstanding natural philosophers of the latter half of the 

 Nineteenth Century must, indeed, be to a large extent a history of 

 Energetics, to use Rankine's convenient nomenclature. These minds, 

 trained under masters of an older school who knew of no such guiding 

 principle, grew with the scientific environment which they were themselves 

 creating. It is not easy for us, who are the heirs of the rich legacy of 

 thought which our immediate predecessors bequeathed to us, fully to realise 

 the greatness of the transformation which they effected. 



We may be able to note here and there the subtle manner in which, 

 not always consciously to themselves, they acted and reacted one upon the 

 other ; but we are perhaps too near the age of transition to see clearly the 

 interplay of all that made for progress. Each of us has had his own 

 peculiar training, his own personal contact with the mighty ones of the 

 immediate past ; and this forms as it were a telescopic tube determining 

 limits to our field of vision. No doubt we may range the whole horizon ; 

 but after all we look from our own point of vantage. What may appear 

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