"RECENT ADVANCES" 349 



members has been preserved, and we find Tait personally responsible for 

 introducing some seventy guests between 1870 and 1884. In August 1871, 

 when the British Association met in Edinburgh, the Club held several 

 meetings ; and among the guests introduced by Tait were Cayley, Clerk 

 Maxwell, Huxley, Bierens de Haan, Colding, Sylvester and Clifford. 



After a vigorous existence for about twenty-five years, the Evening 

 Club began to lose vitality. The members attended irregularly and fitfully, 

 mainly on account of the growing lateness of the dinner hour ; and after 

 an effort to hold it together in a less formal manner the Club was disbanded 

 in 1897. 



It formed an important episode in the life of Tait, bringing him into 

 close social touch with many men whom otherwise he would never have 

 met. Those who attended the meetings during the seventies recall Tait 

 as one of the great personalities, taking his full share in the talk, and 

 enjoying the relaxation from the hard thinking in which he usually passed 

 his evenings. 



But the Club also had a direct bearing on scientific activity ; for it 

 was probably in the free and easy conversation of this Evening Club that 

 there germinated in the minds of George Barclay, the first treasurer of 

 the Club, and Thomas Stevenson, the well known engineer, the idea 

 which finally came to fruition in Tail's Lectures on some Recent Advances 

 in Physical Science. 



RECENT ADVANCES IN PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 



The recent death of Mr George Barclay at the advanced age of 91 

 has led to the discovery among his papers of further information regarding 

 the course of lectures just referred to (see also above, p. 327). On 

 February 14, 1874, Thomas Stevenson issued the circular to the subscribers 

 announcing that the lectures would be delivered in St George's Hall, 

 Randolph Place, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at a quarter past four 

 o'clock, during the months of February, March, and April, the first lecture 

 to be given on Thursday, the igth February. This hall, although convenient 

 as regards situation, was found to be so unsuitable in other respects that 

 after a vain endeavour to find a better place of meeting in the New 

 Town, Thomas Stevenson and George Barclay, who acted respectively 



