GUSTAV MAGNUS. 21 



bo avoid a law, or a possible connection between newly 

 discovered facts. 



It must here be mentioned that Faraday, another 

 great physicist, worked in England exactly in the 

 same direction, and with the same object; to whom, 

 on that account, Magnus was bound by the heartiest 

 sympathy. With Faraday, the antagonism to the phy- 

 sical theories hitherto held, which treated of atoms 

 and forces acting at a distance, was even more pro- 

 nounced than with Magnus. 



We must, moreover, admit that Magnus mostly 

 worked with success on problems which seemed 

 specially adapted to mathematical treatment; as, for 

 instance, his research on the deviation of rotating shot 

 fired from rifled guns ; also his paper on the form of 

 jets of water and their resolution into drops. In the 

 first, he proved, by a very cleverly arranged experi- 

 ment, how the resistance of the air, acting on the ball 

 from below, must deflect it sideways as a rotating 

 body, in a direction depending on that of the rotation ; 

 and. how, in consequence of this, the trajectory is de- 

 flected in the same direction. In the second treatise, 

 he investigated the different forms of jets of water, 

 how they are partly changed by the form of the aper- 

 ture through which they flow, partly in consequence 

 of the manner in which they flow to it ; and how their 

 resolution into drops is caused by external agitation. 



