4r REFOKT 1871. 



had. No more telling example of this could be wished for than the insane delusion 

 under which they permit Euclid to be employed in our elementary teaching. They 

 seem voluntarily to weight alike themselves and their pupils for the race ; and a 

 cynic might, perhaps without much injustice, say they do so that they may have mere 

 self-imposed and avoidable difficulties to face instead of the new, real, and dreaded 

 ones (belonging to regions hitherto unpenetrated) with which Quaternions would too 

 soon enable them to come into contact. But this game will certainly end in disaster. 

 As surely as Mathematics came to a relative stand-still in this country for nearly a 

 century after Newton, so surely will it do so again if we leave our eager and 

 watchful rivals abroad to take the initiative in developing the grand method of 

 Hamilton. And it is not alone French and Germans whom we have now to 

 dread, Russia, America, regenerated Italy, and other nations are all fairly entered 

 for the contest. 



The flights of the imagination which occur to the pure mathematician are in general 

 so much better described in his formulae than in words, that it is not remarkable to 

 find the subject treated by outsiders as something essentially cold and uninteresting, 

 while even the most abstruse branches of physics, as yet totally incapable of 

 being popularized, attract the attention of the uninitiated. The reason may 

 perhaps be sought in the fact that, while perhaps the only successful attempt to 

 invest mathematical reasoning with a halo of glory — that made in this Section by 

 Prof. Sylvester — is known to a comparative few, several of the highest problems 

 of physics are connected with those simple observations which are possible to the 

 many. The smell of lightning has been observed for thousands of years, it required 

 the sagacity of Schonbein to trace it to the formation of Ozone. Not to speak of 

 the (probably fabulous) apple of Newton, what enormous consequences did he 

 obtain by passing light through a mere wedge of glass, and by simply laying a lens 

 on a flat plate ! The patching of a trumpery model led Watt to his magnificent 

 inventions. As children at the sea-shore plajing with a "roaring buckie," or in 

 later life lazily puffing out rings of tobacco-smoke, we are illustrating two of the 

 splendid researches of Helmholtz. And our President, by the bold, because simple, 

 use of reaction instead of action, has eclipsed even his former services to the Sub- 

 marine TelegTaph, and given it powers which but a few years ago woidd have been 

 deemed unattainable. 



In experimental Physics our case is not hopeless, perhaps not as yet even alarm- 

 ing. Still something of the same kind may be said in this as in pure Mathematics. 

 If Thomson's Theory of Dissipation, for instance, be not speedily developed in this 

 country, we shall soon learn its consequences from abroad. The grand test of our 

 science, the proof of its being a reality and not a mere inventing of new terms and 

 squabbling as to what they shall mean, is that it is ever advancing. There is no 

 standing still ; there is no running round and round as in a beaten donkey-track, 

 coming back at the end of a century or so into the old positions, and fighting the 

 self-same battles under slightly different banners, which is merely another fonn of 

 stagnation (Kinetic Stability' in fact). " A little folding of the hands to sleep," 

 in chuckling satisfaction at what has been achieved of late years by our great 

 experimenters, and we shall be left hopelessly behind. The sad fate of Newton's 

 successors ought ever to be a warning to us. Trusting to what he had done, they 

 allowed mathematical science almost to die out in this country, at least as com- 

 pared with its immense progress in Germany and France. It required the united 

 exertions of the late Sir J. Herschel and many others to render possible in these 

 islands a Boole and a Hamilton. If the successors of Davy and Faraday pause to 

 ponder even on their achievements, we shall soon be again in the same state of 

 Ignominious inferiority. Who will then step in to save us ? 



Even as it is, though we have among us many names quite as justly great as any 

 that our rivals can produce, we have also (even in our educated classes) such an 

 immense amount of ignorance and consequent credulity, that it seems matter for 

 surprise that true science is able to exist. Spiritualists, Circle-squarers, Perpetual- 

 motionists, Believers that the earth is flat and that the moon has no rotation, 

 swarm about us. They certainly multiply much faster than do genuine men of 

 science. This is characteristic of all inferior races, but it is consolatory to re- 

 member that in spite of it these soon become extinct. Your quack has his little 



