AT THE PHYSICO-TECHNICAL INSTITUTE 389 



questions he gave us much interesting information about his 

 way of working. To-day we had the address from Professor 

 Hertz; it really was extraordinarily good, very finished in 

 style, tactful and tasteful, and called out a storm of applause.* 



A quarter of a century had passed since Helmholtz had 

 heard Kirchhoff, in his admirable Pro-Rectorial Address, in the 

 Great Hall of Heidelberg University, announce that the dis- 

 covery and logical development of the Law of the Conservation 

 of Energy had been the greatest achievement of the century 

 in natural science : and now he was in the front rank of the 

 auditors of the lecture given by his great pupil Hertz, who 

 had taken his stand upon Helmholtz's earlier criticism of the 

 different electrodynamic theories, accepting his interpretation 

 of the Faraday- Maxwell hypothesis, and had thereby arrived 

 at his own fundamental discoveries. 



1 When in the present century the reactions between electrical 

 currents and magnets became known, which are infinitely more 

 complex than those of gravitation, and in which motion and 

 time play such an important part, it became necessary to 

 increase the number of actions at a distance, and to improve 

 their form. Thus the conception gradually lost its simplicity 

 and physical probability. It was sought to regain this by 

 seeking for comprehensive and simple forms, the so-called 

 elementary laws. Of these the celebrated Weber's law is 

 the important example. Whatever may be thought of its 

 accuracy, this attempt as a whole formed a closed system full 

 of scientific charm: those who were once attracted into its 

 magic circle remained imprisoned there. If the path indicated 

 were a false one, warning could only come from an intellect 

 of the highest originality, from a man who would look at the 

 phenomena with an open mind, and without prejudice, and 

 set out again from what he saw, and not from what he had 

 heard, learned, or read. Such a man was Faraday. . . . To him 

 the electric and magnetic forces became the actually present, 

 tangible realities : while electricity and magnetism were things 

 whose existence was disputable V 



In April, Helmholtz went to Cap d'Antibes to make scientific 

 observations upon the movement of the waves of the sea, and 



1 Hertz, Miscellaneous Papers, English Translation by D. E. Jones, p. 315. 



