364 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. XII 



side we have the University Musical Society doing the 

 practical work, and, in the space between, those conferences 

 of Mr. Sedley Taylor, where the wail of the Siren draws 

 musician and mathematician together down into the depths 

 of their sensational being, and where the gorgeous hues of the 

 Phoneidoscope are seen to seethe and twine and coil like 

 the 



Dragon boughts and elvish emblemings 



on the gates of that city, where 



An ye heard a music, like enow 



They are building still, seeing the city is built 



To music, therefore never built at all 



And therefore built for ever. 



The special educational value of this combined study of 

 music and acoustics is that more than almost any other 

 study it involves a continual appeal to what we must observe 

 for ourselves. 



The facts are things which must be felt ; they cannot be 

 learned from any description of them. 



All this has been said more than 200 years ago by one 

 of our own prophets, William Harvey of Gonville and 

 Caius College : " For whosoever they be that read authors, 

 and do not, by the aid of their own senses, abstract true 

 representations of the things themselves (comprehended 

 in the author's expressions) they do not represent true ideas, 

 but deceitful idols and phantasmas ; by which means they 

 frame to themselves certaine shadows and chimseras, and all 

 their theory and contemplation (which they call science) 

 represents nothing but waking men's dreams and sick men's 

 phrensies." 



After the opening of the Cavendish Laboratory in 

 1874, the most continuous, as well as the most import- 

 ant, work of the Chair was the superintendence of 

 various courses of experiments, undertaken by young 

 aspirants for scientific distinction. With character- 



