48 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



This portrait was presented by the subscribers to Mrs Tait, who 

 has now gifted it to the Natural Philosophy Department of Edinburgh 

 University. It hangs in the library where the students gather to read the 

 books of reference and study their notes. 



Nearly ten years later Sir George Reid undertook a second portrait, 

 which was subscribed to by Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

 This portrait is the property of the Royal Society ; but two replicas of it 

 were made by Sir George Reid. One of these is hung in the National 

 Portrait Gallery of Scotland, Queen Street, Edinburgh, and the other in 

 the hall of Peterhouse, Cambridge. It is a three-quarter length portrait, 

 and gives a faithful representation of Tait standing in a thoughtful attitude 

 just in the act of elucidating some difficult point in mathematics or physics. 



The Peterhouse portrait was unveiled on October 29, 1902, by Lord 

 Kelvin, who gave some interesting reminiscences of how he and Tait 

 worked together. The following report is from the Cambridge Chronicle : 



" Lord Kelvin said he valued most highly the privilege of being allowed to ask 

 the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse to accept for their College a portrait of 

 Professor Tait. He felt especially grateful for this privilege as a forty-years' comrade, 

 friend, and working ally of Tait. Their friendship began about 1860, when Tait came 

 to Scotland to succeed Forbes as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. He 

 remembered Tait once remarking that nothing but science was worth living for. It 

 was sincerely said then, but Tait himself proved it to be not true later. Tait was a 

 great reader. He would get Shakespeare, Dickens, and Thackeray off by heart. His 

 memory was wonderful. What he once read sympathetically he ever after remembered. 

 Thus he was always ready with delightful quotations, and these brightened their hours 

 of work. For they did heavy mathematical work, stone breaking was not in it. A 

 propos, perhaps, of the agonies (he did not mean pains, he meant struggles) of the 

 mathematical problems which they had always with them, Tait once astonished him 

 with Goethe's noble lines, showing sorrow as raising those who knew it to a higher 

 level of spiritual life and more splendid views all round than it was fashionable to 

 suppose fell to the lot of those who live a humdrum life of happiness. He did not 

 know them, having never read ' Sorrows of WertherV 

 ' Who never ate bread in tears, 



Who never through long nights of sorrow 



Sat weeping on his bed, 



He knows you not, ye heavenly powers." 



But Tait gave it him in the original German, with just one word changed. 



' Wer nie sein Brod mit Thranen ass, 

 Wer nie die kummervolle Nachte 

 An seinem Bette rauschend sass, 

 Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Machte.' 

 1 The passage is from the Lehrjahre, Book II, Chapter xin 



