186 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



sold out. The reviews were all highly complimentary, partly perhaps for the 

 reason that the ordinary reviewer very soon found himself out of his depth. 

 The Athenaeum of Oct. 5, 1867, thus chronicled its advent : 



"A professor of Glasgow and one of Edinburgh, both well known to the world 

 of science, have produced 750 pages as a first volume only. We defer description 

 until we see the whole. The mathematical part is of a formidable character, and 

 of the most modern type. The authors are thoroughly up to their subject, and 

 have strong physical as well as mathematical tastes. The size of the volume is the 

 fault of the subject and not of the authors, who have, so far as we have looked 

 closely, kept down details. If anything they have not sufficiently diluted the 

 mathematical part with expanded demonstration. But what of that? The higher 

 class students for whom this work is intended are rats who can gnaw through any- 

 thing: though even their teeth will be tried here and there, we can tell them." 



The last sentence suggests the touch of De Morgan. 



The Engineer of Nov. i, and the Medical Times and Gazette of Nov. 16, 

 1867, both journals of scientific standing, described at some length the contents 

 of the book, the latter ending with the sentences : 



"Should the three succeeding volumes at all come up in value to the present 

 one, Thomson and Tait's Natural Philosophy will deserve to take place with 

 Newton's Principia and Laplace's Mtcanique Celeste. This is strong language, but 

 not too strong." 



A long and somewhat discursive review appeared in the Scotsman of 

 Nov. 6, 1868, fully a year after the publication of the Treatise, The reviewer 

 was, however, keenly alive to the real merits of the contribution made by 

 Thomson and Tait to the scientific literature of our time. Referring to the 

 authors he wrote : 



" They are to a certain extent a happy complement of each other the one being 

 deeply speculative but slightly nebulous in the utterance of his original thoughts, 

 as often happens with profound thinkers ; the other, though not deficient in 

 originality, being clear, dashing, direct and practical.... What they exactly know they 

 state in a plain intelligible manner.... What they do not know they do not pretend 

 to explain.... 



"The authors zealously adhere to Newton, and they restore his methods and 

 doctrines where they can not without reason. They do not much pretend to 

 originality indeed they do not pretend to it at all. They quite openly and frankly 

 lay hold of every mathematician or philosopher who has anything useful to them, 

 and pillage him outright always, of course, with the most handsome acknowledge- 

 ments. Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Euler, Gauss, Joule, d'Alembert, Liouville, and 

 the Irish (at least not the Scotch) Sir W. Hamilton are all laid under contribution, 

 and the hard heavy scientific slab which each other had dug for himself out of the 

 big bottomless quarry of Nature, as his personal title to immortality, is looked at 



