68 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



colour. The light emitted is blue-green, green, yellow, 

 orange, and even red in different cases. It is always 

 due to the oxidation of a separate fatty chemical body, 

 which can in many instances be extracted, then dried, 

 and subsequently made luminous by moistening with 

 ether, in consequence of which oxidation by the oxygen 

 of the atmosphere is facilitated. 



28. Reminiscences of Lord Kelvin 



The late Lord Kelvin was one of the most fascinating 

 personalities in the learned world. He uttered with a 

 delightful simplicity the thoughts, however romantic 

 and fanciful, which bubbled up in his wonderful brain. 

 It was because he was so much of a poet that he 

 was so great a man of science. Atoms and molecules 

 and vortices, and the vibrations and gyrations of ether, 

 and " sorting demons " were all pictured in his mind's 

 eye, and used as counters of thought to give shape and 

 the equivalent of tangible reality to his conceptions. 

 By such conceptions he was able to present to himself 

 and his listeners the complex mechanisms of crystals, 

 of liquids, of gases, of electrical and magnetic currents, 

 and the endless astounding proceedings of rays of light 

 unsuspected by the ordinary man. 



I think the last occasion on which he spoke in public 

 was after Sir David Gill's brilliant address to the British 

 Association at Leicester last August. Lord Kelvin was 

 sitting close to me on that occasion, and I noticed that 

 he never moved his gaze from the speaker. He followed 

 Sir David's account of stars, whose distance is stated by 

 the number of years it takes for their light to travel to 

 this earth, like an enraptured schoolboy, and cheered 

 when the evidence for the existence of two great streams 

 of movement of the heavenly bodies, in opposite direc- 

 tions, going no one knows whither, coming no one knows 



