220 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



My third chapter is ready, and I had thought of sending it to press but on 

 second thoughts, I refrained knowing that you would make far more serious 

 alterations on printed pages (especially if formed into sheets) than you would care to 

 do on a mere MS. Once you have looked over it in MSS you will not have the 

 face to protest against it in type. 



You are getting imbued with a little of Pecksniff rather as regard motives and 

 actions than as regards style ; still you have caught some of the style also. 



But it is simply true, as I told you, that your printed proof of 



is no proof at all not even a chain of reasoning, merely a set of detached links ! 

 How you let it be printed in such a state I can't imagine. Everybody sees you 

 had the proof in your eye, but whether you or the printers omitted a leading step 

 I can't of course tell.... 



When do you return ? U must come to I, or I 2 U, as soon as possible, for 

 there is very much pressing work. 



Yrs. T. 



In July, 1868, Maxwell acknowledged receipt of the complete work in 

 these words: 



"I will write you about your treatise at earliest but (i) I, personally, am satisfied 

 with the book as a development of T' and as an account of a subject when the ideas 

 are new and as I well know almost unknown to the most eminent scientific men. 

 It is a great thing to get this expressed anyhow and I think you have done it 

 intelligibly as well as accurately. But with respect to the bits of matter I sent you, 

 do you not think there are breaches of continuity between some, e.g., the statement 

 about dynamical theories and the context, if they do not actually contradict the 

 context, at least the N. B. Review part of it. If you disagree with anything of mine, 

 out with it, for it is better to go into print having one opinion than with two 

 opinions to throw the reader into perplexity. 



"(2) I shall see what case Clausius has. 



"(3) Who is Charles that I might believe on him?" 



In a review of the second edition of Tail's Thermodynamics in Nature, 

 Vol. xvn (1877), Maxwell wrote: 



"In the popular treatise, whatever threads of science are allowed to appear, are 

 exhibited in an exceedingly diffuse and attenuated form, apparently with the hope that 

 the mental faculties of the reader, though they would reject any stronger food, may 

 insensibly become saturated with scientific phraseology, provided it is diluted with 

 a sufficient quantity of more familiar language.... In this way by simple reading the 

 student may become possessed of the phrases of the science without having been 

 put to the trouble of thinking a single thought about it... 



"The technical treatises do less harm, for no one ever reads them except under 

 compulsion.... 



