30 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



Occasionally, when the meetings were very full, part of the audience had 

 to cross between the reader's desk and the Council Table and take their 

 seats behind the secretaries' chairs. For modern lecture purposes a worse 

 arrangement could hardly have been devised ; and yet it was quite in keeping 

 with the fundamental idea of a Society whose Fellows met to communicate 

 and discuss subjects of literary and scientific interest. At any rate, the reader 

 or lecturer from his position in front of the blackboard looked across his small 

 table towards the President at the far end of the long table, and addressed 

 the Chair in reality, not contenting himself with the formal phrase which 

 has largely lost its significance. 



It seems but yesterday when Piazzi Smythe with the peculiar hesitation 

 in his speech uttered his tloge of Leverrier in the quaintly wrought involved 

 sentences of a bygone century. Or it was Kelvin moving eagerly on the soft 

 carpet and putting his gyrostats through their dynamical drill ; or Fleeming 

 Jenkin amusing and instructing the audience with the sounds of the first 

 phonograph which was used scientifically to analyse human speech ; or Lister 

 quaffing a glass of milk which had lain for weeks simply covered up by 

 a lid under which no air germs could creep ; or Turner demonstrating the 

 characteristics of whales or of human skulls ; or Tait himself talking in easy 

 English about strains and mirage, golf ball underspin or kinetic theory of gases. 



With the exception of the last two years of his life Tait hardly ever 

 failed throughout his long tenure of the Secretaryship to be at the meetings 

 of the Royal Society. There he sat listening courteously it might be to the 

 most wearisome of readers who knew not how to give the broad lines without 

 the details or on the alert for the next bit of inimitable humour with which 

 Lord Neaves when presiding used to delight the Society. No one could 

 enjoy a joke better than Tait ; and who could resist being infected with his 

 whole-hearted laugh or the merry twinkle in the eye which some humorous 

 situation called forth ? To many of the frequenters of the meetings in the 

 seventies and eighties, Tait was in fact the Royal Society ; and there is no 

 doubt that he guided its affairs with consummate skill. At the Council 

 meetings which occurred regularly twice a month during the working session 

 all matters of business were carefully presented by him in due order. It was 

 his duty to conduct the correspondence of the Society, which during his 

 Secretaryship grew steadily with the progress of the years. 



Lord Kelvin, especially during his various terms of office as President, 

 attended the meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh with fair 



