138 Britain's Heritage of Science 



excursions into other subjects, partly suggested to him by 

 his interest in the structure of the earth, but partly discon- 

 nected entirely from his main work, such as his investiga- 

 tions on some problems of sound and light and on the 

 velocity of rifle bullets. He claimed amongst other achieve- 

 ments to have been the originator of the " long drop " in 

 capital punishment. 



Of G. F. Fitzgerald (1851-1901) we cannot speak 

 without lamenting the loss inflicted on science by his early 

 death. He was one of the select few whose genius extends 

 beyond the limits of their own productive work, stimulating 

 the thoughts and penetrating the efforts of their contempo- 

 raries. One of the earliest students of Maxwell's electro- 

 magnetic theory, he realized probably more than anyone 

 else its wonderful future. Of the practical applications of 

 wireless telegraphy he had no thought his interests lay in 

 other directions but he felt that the final proof of the theory 

 must be sought in the experimental confirmation of the 

 transmission of electro -dynamic waves through space, and 

 saw that the difficulty to be overcome was the power 

 necessary to convey the energy from the metallic conductors 

 to the medium. His thoughts even ran ahead of Maxwell's 

 theory, and he escaped the common error of apostles 

 of a new doctrine, who adopt the unavoidable limita- 

 tions of a first presentment as an immovable dogma, 

 mistaking the passing faults of a child for essential features 

 of its character. It was a necessary step in the evolution 

 of the Faraday-Maxwell conception of electrical action that 

 an electric current should be looked upon as the flow of a 

 coherent substance satisfying everywhere the condition of 

 incompressibility. But when the relation between electrical 

 actions and molecular phenomena were considered, the 

 laws of electrolysis suggested that, like matter, electricity 

 might have an atomic constitution. Most of the professed 

 adherents of Maxwell's doctrine would have none of this 

 idea. It seemed to them to violate the dogma of incom- 

 pressibility. But Fitzgerald recognized that there was no 

 real contradiction, and he became one of the great advocates 

 of the electron theory. In this, as in other matters, his 

 mind was receptive and appreciative of the efforts of others, 



