LECTURER AND TEACHER 17 



has attained to great and solid scientific acquirements, and to very much of that 

 habitual accuracy which his rival, Mr Maxwell, possesses by a sort of intuition. 

 We have never heard Mr Tait lecture, but we should augur from all we can learn 

 that he will have great powers of impressing and instructing an audience such as 

 his class will consist of, combined with that conscientious industry which is so 

 necessary in a successful professor." 



Whoever wrote these words or supplied the underlying thoughts had 

 formed a just estimate of the respective strengths of the candidates. Fuller 

 was certainly one of the greatest mathematical teachers any Scottish University 

 ever possessed ; Routh was unsurpassed in Cambridge as a trainer of Senior 

 Wranglers and has, moreover, left his mark on dynamical science ; Maxwell 

 towers as one of the creative geniuses of all time, curiously lacking though 

 he was in the power of oral exposition ; Tait, who possessed, also by intuition, 

 the clearest physical conceptions, has left behind him a great record of 

 research both in mathematics and physics, while, as a teacher and clear 

 exponent of physical laws and principles, he took a foremost place among his 

 contemporaries. 



He had all the gifts of a born lecturer. His tall form and magnificent 

 head at once impressed the student audiences which gathered year after year 

 on the opening day of the session. The impression was deepened as with 

 easy utterance, clear enunciation, and incisive phrase, he proceeded to indicate 

 the nature of the subject of study. 



J. M. Barrie in An Edinburgh Eleven gives a graphic picture of Tait 

 lecturing : 



" Never, I think, can there have been a more superb demonstrator. I have his 

 burly figure before me. The small twinkling eyes had a fascinating gleam in them ; 

 he could concentrate them until they held the object looked at ; when they flashed 

 round the room he seemed to have drawn a rapier. I have seen a man fall back 

 in alarm under Tail's eyes, though there were a dozen benches between them. These 

 eyes could be merry as a boy's, though, as when he turned a tube of water on 

 students who would insist on crowding too near an experiment " 



This is good ; but in some other respects Barrie's pen portrait is unsatisfactory 

 if not misleading. For example in the succeeding paragraph he states that 

 " Tail's science weighed him to the earth " a remark almost too grotesque to 

 need refutation. With regard to the real character of the man whose eyes 

 could flash rapier-like glances or scintillate with heartiest merriment Barrie 

 had, indeed, little chance of intimate knowledge. Tait used to speak of 

 T. 3 



