June 26, 1913] 



NATURE 



437 



Fortunate in his home training, here and at Glas- 

 gow, under the careful and most competent direction 

 of his father, he had completed the excellent general 

 education which the University of Glasgow then 

 afforded at an age when, in our leisurely days, he 

 would still have been a schoolboy. He was thus able, 

 like many a Scotch and Irish student before and 

 since, to enjoy to the full the opportunities for ad- 

 vanced study, for initiation into the flowing tide of 

 knowledge, which the University of Cambridge has 

 always afforded to those who have known how to 

 search for them with self-reliance and sincerity. 

 And he had the good fortune to be able to combine 

 serious studies, in a noteworthy degree, with active 

 and fruitful relaxation ; for he was one of the founders 

 of the University Musical Society, and at the same 

 time a prominent and successful oarsman. Thus he 

 was not tempted to blunt his intellect, even tem- 

 porarily, by early over-exertion ; and though the 

 examiners were not able to assign him the first place 

 in the race for degrees over the limited prescribed 

 course, even that was prejudged, for they were well 

 aware, as one of them expressed it, that there was 

 a man among the candidates they were to test whose 

 pens they were scarcely qualified to mend. By the 

 continued forethought of his father he passed on from 

 Cambridge to Paris, then the chief centre of mathe- 

 matical and physical science ; he arrived provided with 

 ample personal introductions, so that the diary which 

 he sent home gives a most interesting account of the 

 lives and activities of the investigators who were 

 there at work in the middle of the last century. 

 Young as he was, we can recognise that he moved 

 among them on equal terms, and could impart as 

 much as he gained. Inspection of his notebooks of 

 this period, which fortunately have been preserved, 

 and may in time be given to the world, shows that, 

 as has been the case with so many men of genius, 

 the main formative ideas came to him in early years. 

 These rough records reveal that in his student time 

 at Cambridge, or very soon after, he was already 

 in effective possession of most of the advances which 

 he gradually matured and made public during the 

 next ten years : the period in which he was chiefly 

 concerned with the theoretical side of electrical science. 

 When, nearly twenty years ago, in the height of his 

 fame, he took part in the centenary celebration of the 

 Institute of France as one of its eight foreign asso- 

 ciate members, he recalled his obligations to Paris 

 and to her great men of fifty years before, in words 

 of dignity and charm which sent a thrill of patriotic 

 pleasure through the brilliant audience that he ad- 

 dressed. He was equally at home, and enjoyed equal 

 affection and honour, among his compeers in Berlin, in 

 Rome, in Washington ; in fact, he had come in his 

 later vears to be venerated as embodying the universal 

 ideal of the scientific spirit, transcending all limita- 

 tions of nationality. 



The fame and achievement of Lord Kelvin thus 

 belong to all the world ; yet we of Ulster have taken 

 care to assert our special interest in his career. I 

 am sure he would have cordially welcomed our claim 

 that he is of ourselves. The connection of the Scot- 

 tish universities, especially that of Glasgow, with the 

 Ulster people has been intimate and prolonged. In 

 the eighteenth century these great institutions were, 

 owing to racial and religious affinities and geograph- 

 ical proximity, a main centre of our own higher 

 education. But if we were thus under obligation to 

 Scottish learning and intellect, there is also the other 

 side of the account. In Francis Hutcheson, Ulster 

 gave to Glasgow the pioneer of the Scottish school of 

 philosophy, and one of the great names in the history 

 of ethical speculation. Somewhat later we sent from 

 Belfast to Glasgow and Edinburgh one who will 

 NO. 2278, VOL. 91] 



always be held in honour, as chief among the founders 

 of modern chemistry, Joseph Black, the clear-sighted 

 discoverer of latent heat and of fixed air, the con- 

 genial friend of Adam Smith, David Hume, and 

 Lavoisier. In our own time we gave the great man 

 whom we now commemorate, supreme both in unfold- 

 ing the intellectual foundations of physical science and 

 in stimulating its fertile applications in an age of 

 which they have been the special characteristic. 



Our interest in Lord Kelvin has another aspect, 

 namely, that in this city we have been in a very direct 

 sense his scientific pupils. When some of us were 

 students at the Queen's College, now the University, 

 the chair of natural philosophy was held by _ Prof. 

 Everett, who had come to us direct from service as 

 Lord Kelvin's assistant in the University of Glasgow, 

 and whose whole scientific activity and enthusiasm 

 were directed towards the exposition of his master s 

 fundamental work with which he had been thoroughly 

 imbued in Glasgow; it was then fresh, and indeed 

 largely in the. making, and, it must be admitted, no 

 easier" for us (his students) to understand on that 

 account. We had here, as professor of engineering, 

 his elder brother, James Thomson, afterwards also 

 given to Glasgow, a pioneer, greater than we then 

 knew in the consolidation of science with practice; 

 the volume containing his scientific papers, recently 

 published, bears witness to his ample share in the 

 genius of the family, and to his intimate relations 

 with Lord Kelvin. We had Thomas Andrews as pro- 

 fessor of chemistry, whose profound scientific achieve- 

 ments, executed with modest apparatus of local con- 

 struction, have shed permanent lustre on his native 

 province. And not least, we had John _ Purser as 

 professor of mathematics, a congenial scientific and 

 personal friend of Lord Kelvin, at the same time in 

 close contact with his own famous mathematical school 

 of the University of Dublin, one of the choice minds 

 of the time, wlio was wont to enchant those of us 

 who could follow him by brilliant informal discourse 

 about the problems of the day. The scientific work 

 of Lord Kelvin was thus closely appreciated and 

 studied among us here, as early as it could have been 

 anywhere; he has been a permanent element in the 

 intellectual life of the city of his early years, and on 

 that account this local memorial, so spontaneously 

 provided by his fellow-citizens, is a most appropriate 

 tribute to his memory. 



His name will pass down the ages as the out- 

 standing guiding spirit of the period when the 

 weapons of physical science were brought out of her 

 secluded armoury, and turned to the reconstruction 

 of our material civilisation. For we have now passed 

 on rapidly from the age of steam into the age of 

 electricity; we have had the good fortune to watch 

 in our own day the progress of that subtle agency 

 of silent power, until it has transformed most of the 

 departments of industrial and social life The dreams 

 which were mixed with the wonder of the early elec- 

 tric discoverers have been more than accomplished. 

 But this advance has become possible only by being 

 the most conspicuous example of ordered and per- 

 sistent scientific method that the world has seen. 

 Every minute natural manifestation of electric agency, 

 whether detected by the foresight of men like r-ara- 

 day, or revealed in part by accident, has had to be 

 accurately and closely analysed, as a prelude to 

 eliciting 'its possibilities on an industrial scale. lne 

 method of true progress must have been impressed 

 especially upon Lord Kelvin during those strenuous 

 telegraphic years, when he was by force of circum- 

 stances dragged out of his study to battle with prac- 

 tical engineering difficulties— when, by submitting 

 every phenomenon to that refined measurement and 



