44 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



after recovery from wounds received at Magersfontein. The cheerfulness never quite 

 returned." 



On opening his Divinity class the succeeding session Professor Flint 



uttered a beautiful tribute to the memory of his friend. This was 



published shortly afterwards in the Student, the Edinburgh University 

 Magazine, and is now reproduced in full. 



THE LATE PROFESSOR TAIT 

 AN APPRECIATION BY PROFESSOR FLINT 



Since we last met here the University has lost through death the teacher who had 

 been longest in her service, who was probably the most widely renowned member of 

 her professorial staff. He was known to almost all of you not only by report but 

 by personal contact and acquaintance, for almost all of you have come directly from 

 his class room to the class rooms in the Divinity Hall. Undoubtedly it was a great 

 advantage for our students here that they should have entered the Hall through 

 that portal, and received the instruction and come under the influence of one 

 universally recognised to have had not only a genius of the first order for research, 

 but rare gifts as a teacher. He was not one whom his students were likely ever 

 to forget, while many of them must have felt that they owed to him far more than 

 they could estimate or express. 



If you have not learned to be interested in the truths of Natural Philosophy, 

 the fault cannot have been your teacher's, and unless altogether incapable of 

 learning anything, you at least cannot have failed to learn the very important lesson 

 that such a man's mind was immeasurably larger than your own. 



Our deceased friend was a man of strong, self-consistent individuality. He was 

 "himself like to himself alone." And he had about him the charm inseparable from 

 such a character. He never lost the freshness of spirit which so soon disappears in 

 the majority of men that it is apt to be deemed distinctive of youth. There was to 

 the last a delightful boyishness of heart in him such as is assuredly a precious thing 

 to possess. I am quite aware that great as he was, he had his own limitations, and 

 sometimes looked at things and persons from one-sided and exaggerated points of 

 view, but the consequent aberrations of judgment were of a kind which did no one 

 much harm and only made himself the more interesting. His strong likes and 

 dislikes, although generally in essentials just, were apt to be too strong. Although, 

 like all great physicists, he was not really uninterested in metaphysics, yet he felt 

 and professed the most supreme contempt for all that he called metaphysics. In 

 connection with that I may mention an incident which once afforded much 

 amusement to academic men in St Andrews, but is probably now forgotten even 

 there. Shortly after Tait had delivered the remarkable lectures to which we owe the 

 work entitled Recent Advances in Physical Science, he dined one evening at the 

 house of the Professor of Mathematics in St Andrews, and among other guests 



