NATURE 



35 



THURSDAY. JULY 13, iqn. 



.4 GREAT NATURAL PHILOSOPHER. 



Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait. By 

 Cargill Gilston Knott. Pp. x + 379. (Cam- 

 bridge: University Press, 1911.) Price 10s. 6d. 

 net. 



TWO large quarto volumes of Prof. Tait's collected 

 papers were published some time ago by the 

 Cambridge University Press, and these have now 

 been supplemented by an exceedingly interesting 

 account of Tait's life and work, from the pen of his 

 pupil and friend, Dr. C. G. Knott. Every Edinburgh 

 student must recognise the fidelity of the picture 

 which Dr. Knott has drawn, and feel that his book is 

 in all respects a worthy memorial of the great Edin- 

 burgh professor. The book will appeal very directly 

 to many of the readers of Nature, who remember the 

 searching and trenchant reviews of books on physical 

 mathematics, and the articles on such subjects as the 

 physics of golf, and on questions connected with 

 physical mathematics, which appeared in these 

 columns from time to time, and were signed with the 

 initials " P. G. T." Many of these less formal papers 

 were of much scientific interest, which was not 

 lessened by the eminently human personality of the 

 writer, which appeared in every sentence, and the 

 humour, a little grim at times, with which he illus- 

 trated or drove home his conclusions. 



In a review of Tait's "Thermodynamics " in Nature 

 (January 31 and February 7, 1878. vol. xvii.) 

 Clerk Maxwell said, "Science has enough to 

 do to restrain the strong human nature of 

 the author, who is at no pains to conceal his own 

 idiosyncrasies, or to smooth down the obtrusive anti- 

 nomies of a vigorous mind into the featureless con- 

 sistency of a conventional philosopher." These words 

 are a true description of Tait, the outspoken and 

 uncompromising controversialist, the critic unsparing 

 of error, but not without regard for the feelings of 

 the advocates of views which he combated or de- 

 nounced, the philosopher who said hard things re- 

 garding professed metaphysicians, but who thought 

 of the foundations of dynamics and did not disdain 

 to adduce metaphysical considerations for the justifi- 

 cation of a fundamental principle of quaternions. 

 Such men are rare at the present time. Everybody is 

 superficially and laboriously polite ; the old broad- 

 sword play of word and phrase is too often replaced 

 by suggestion and innuendo. But a good knockdown 

 blow or cut is better than a sting that empoisons the 

 blood and festers. 



Tait was a native of Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, 

 and studied his rudiments in the grammar school of 

 that town. At the age of ten, on the death of his 

 father, he was brought with the family to the citv in 

 which his life-work was to be done, and became a 

 pupil of the Edinburgh Academy, a day school which 

 from its foundation in 1824 has always been famous 

 for the soundness of its classical and mathematical 

 instruction. There he had as schoolfellows Clerk 

 NO. 2176, VOL. 87] 



Maxwell, Lewis Campbell, Fleeming Jenkin, and 

 several others who achieved eminence or fame in 

 after life. Maxwell was his senior by a year. It 

 is foolish to attach very great importance to school 

 examinations — some minds begin to mature sooner 

 than others — but it is interesting to note that Tait, 

 Campbell, and Maxwell seem to have been nearly 

 equally distinguished in mathematics. All were 

 soundly drilled in classics ; the rector of the academy 

 was an eminent classical scholar — the Ven. John 

 Williams (curiously enough at the same time Arch- 

 deacon of Cardigan), who was chosen first rector in 

 1824, mainly at the instance of Sir Walter Scott. 

 Tait had an excellent verbal memory, and used in 

 after life to repeat much Greek and Latin poetry 

 learned in the forms of the academy. 



It is rather remarkable that at the University of 

 Edinburgh neither Maxwell nor Tait excelled the best 

 of their fellow-students in natural philosophy. Per- 

 haps in music alone does early precocity precede the 

 highest excellence in maturity ; but then musical 

 genius is much less dependent on the ripening of the 

 logical powers. For original work in mathematics 

 and physics a natural gift or instinct is, of course, 

 essential. 



Tait's career at Cambridge, and his initiation in 

 the following years into experimental work in the 

 laboratory of Dr. Andrews at Belfast, were incidents 

 in the scheme of things which led to his return to 

 Edinburgh in i860 as the successor of Forbes. Tait 

 entered at Peterhouse in 1848, Maxwell in 1850, but 

 afterwards migrated to Trinity, and both, like Thom- 

 son (afterwards Lord Kelvin) before them, had William 

 Hopkins as their private tutor. Each had his own 

 strong personality, but the influence of that great 

 teacher seems to have been of the best possible kind 

 for the minds of all. Tait was Senior Wrangler and 

 First Smith's Prizeman in 1852, and his first act 

 when the Tripos result was declared was to telegraph 

 home and ask that the news should be told to Gloag, 

 his old mathematical master at the academy. 



While professor of pure mathematics in Queen's 

 College, Belfast, and working in the laboratory of 

 Dr. Andrews, he was introduced by Andrews to Rowan 

 Hamilton, at that time in the full tide of his quater- 

 nion work, and busy with the preparation of the 

 " Elements " for publication. Then began an inter- 

 change of letters on quaternions, of which Dr. Knott, 

 con amore as himself an ardent and accomplished 

 quaternionist, has given a most interesting account. 

 Apparently Tait's first letters, which were chiefly on 

 difficulties raised by his perusal of the "Lectures on 

 Quaternions," attracted Hamilton's attention to the 

 writer as one likely to cultivate the new calculus and 

 extend it to fields of physical research. Hamilton's 

 own applications were mainly geometrical; Tait saw 

 in quaternions a powerful instrument for the dynamical 

 study of various branches of physics, which, in fact, 

 placed at once in a new light all that analysis, applic- 

 able to so many different problems, in which 

 Green's analytical theorem plays a prominent part. 

 The result was his paper on Green's theorem, and, 

 later, many of those physical investigations which 

 form the latter part of his "Treatise on Quaternions." 



