HONOURS AND AWARDS 47 



W. Rutherford, Laycock, Sir T. Grainger Stewart, Sir John Goodsir, 

 Sir Lyon (Lord) Playfair, Sir J. Y. Simpson, Sir Robert Christison, 

 Allman, Sir Wyville Thomson, Spence, Syme, Annandale, and Sanders. 

 To them we may add the Chancellors, Lord Brougham and Lord Inglis. 



Tait was awarded the Keith Prize twice (1867-9 and 1871-3) by 

 the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was the second holder (1887-90) 

 of the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize. The Royal Society of London 

 awarded him a Royal Medal in 1886 for his various mathematical and 

 physical researches. 



The following are the principal recognitions by Societies and Universities: 

 Honorary Member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 

 1868; Honorary Doctor of Science of the University of Ireland, 1875; 

 Honorary Fellow, Societas Regia Hauniensis (Copenhagen), 1876 ; Honorary 

 Fellow, Soci^te" Batave de Philosophic Experimental (Rotterdam), 1890; 

 Honorary Fellow, Societas Regia Scientiarum (Upsala), 1894; Honorary 

 Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, 1900; Honorary Doctor of Laws, 

 Glasgow University, 1901. 



In 1882 some of Tail's many friends in Edinburgh commissioned 

 George Reid (now Sir George) to paint a portrait of the Professor of 

 Natural Philosophy in the act of lecturing. On the blackboard behind is 

 the Curve of Vertices by means of which he elucidated the phenomena of 

 mirage, with the Hamiltonian equation alongside. The general effect of the 

 portrait is well described in the following contemporary criticism of the 

 Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy. 



"In portraits, George Reid's most characteristic effort is a portrait of Professor 

 Tait. The grand domed cranium of the Professor of Physics, and his sagacious, 

 solemnly comical face, seem to surmount a figure more likely to be met with in a 

 Skye crofter's potato plot as a scarecrow, than among the amenities of a Scottish 

 University. But the next look reassures you. The coat, as well as the noble head, 

 is Professor Tait's veriest own the coat, in fact, 'with which he divineth.' Even 

 if the blackboard, and the high mathematical hieroglyphic thereon emblazoned, were 

 silent, the Professor's ' office coat ' is so redolent of chalk and experimental physics, 

 that to old habitues of his class room, it would recount the tale of a hundred fights 

 between the cutting mental gymnastic of the Professor and the mystic powers of 

 mathematical abstraction. Altogether, this is a masterly portrait of a master, who 

 knows no living rival in the sphere which he has made his own. As I stand and 

 look on the characteristic picture I almost fancy that I can catch, on the solemn 

 face of the grim mathematician demonstrator, some faint suspicion of a good-natured 

 smile at the grotesqueness of the toggery in which he has chosen to be handed 

 down to posterity." 



