266 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



he succeeded as president of the Society. These names 

 are identified with some of the greatest work in experi- 

 mental science. Some of them may be said to be identi- 

 fied with quite original theoretical ideas which have 

 governed the development of great departments of re- 

 search ever since. Dalton's atomic theory in chemistry, 

 however, received a tardy recognition in England, and 

 was firmly established only by foreign research, while 

 Faraday's "lines of force" remained a mystery to elec- 

 tricians, 1 till William Thomson and Clerk Maxwell made 

 them the groundwork of our most recent conceptions. 

 It is well to note that neither Young, nor Davy, nor 

 Faraday, nor Dalton, nor Joule belonged to the circle 

 of Cambridge men, and that probably none of them re- 

 ceived any inspiration from that official school of English 

 mathematics. 2 In the early years of the century that 



1 See Helmholtz on Faraday's 

 ideas in ' Vortriige und Reden,' vol. 

 ii. p. 277. " Since the mathemati- 

 cal interpretation of Faraday's theo- 

 rems has been given by Clerk Max- 

 well in methodically elaborated 

 scientific formulae, we see, indeed, 

 how much definiteness of conception 

 and accurate thought were con- 

 tained in Faraday's words, which 

 seemed to his contemporaries so 

 indefinite and obscure. And it is 

 indeed remarkable in the highest 

 degree to observe how, by a kind 

 of intuition, without using a single 

 formula, he found out a number of 

 comprehensive theorems, which can 

 only be strictly proved by the 

 highest powers of mathematical 

 analysis. I would not depreciate 

 Faraday's contemporaries because 

 they did not recognise this ; I 

 know how often I found myself 

 despairingly staring at his descrip- 

 tions of lines of force, their number 



and tension, or looking for the 

 meaning of sentences in which the 

 galvanic current is defined as an 

 axis of force, and similar things. 

 A single remarkable discovery can 

 indeed be brought about by a happy 

 chance, . . . but it would be against 

 all rules of probability that a numer- 

 ous series of the most important 

 discoveries, such as Faraday pro- 

 duced, could have had their origin 

 in conceptions which did not really 

 contain a correct, though perhaps 

 deeply hidden, ground of truth." 



2 Young resided at Cambridge to 

 take his medical degree on his re- 

 turn from Gottingen ; but though 

 his biographer has inserted a chap- 

 ter on Cambridge in the ' Life of 

 Young,' and though Young's first 

 great discovery, that of the inter- 

 ferences of waves of sound and light, 

 fell within that period, there is no 

 evidence that his scientific studies 

 were promoted by Cambridge influ- 



