CHAPTER XIV 



PRESIDENTSHIPS OF LORD KELVIN, LORD LISTER AND 

 SIR WILLIAM HUGGINS, 1890-1902 



WHEN the Royal Society chose Sir William Thomson as 

 its President it placed at its head the most brilliant natural 

 philosopher who had sat in its presidential chair since 

 Isaac Newton quitted it. Every department of physics 

 upon which he flashed his original genius was at once illumi- 

 nated and enlarged. Not only did he display consummate 

 power in the investigation of the most subtle problems in 

 thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, electricity and magnetism, 

 but his fertile invention and mechanical faculty enabled 

 him to devise the most accurate and delicate instruments 

 for scientific research. While his sweep of vision reached 

 far beyond the ken of most of his contemporaries, he never 

 lost sight of the practical applications of his work. At 

 one time he would reveal the secret of the problem of trans- 

 mitting messages through transoceanic electric cables, at 

 another time he would construct a new type of mariner's 

 compass which would supersede all previous forms. And 

 with all this range and fertility of thought he remained 

 one of the most modest of men, ever anxious to learn from 

 others what they could tell him from departments of 

 knowledge outside his own immediate purview. 



At the time of his entering on his Presidentship he was 

 still the active Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Univer- 

 sity of Glasgow, as he had been for forty-four years. But 

 notwithstanding the distance of his class-room and laboratory 

 from Burlington House, which had many years before proved 



