714 REPORT— 1902. 



it who is now well known as the Right Honourable William J. Pirrie. He had 

 found out for himself that he needed a certain kind of knowledge if he was to 

 escape from mere rule-of-thumb methods in shipbuilding work ; it could at 

 that time be obtained nowhere in the North of Ireland except at that class, and of 

 course he attended the class. For forty-two years the Science and Art Depart- 

 ment, which has recently doubled its already great efficiency, has been giving 

 chances of this kind to every clever young man in the country, from long before 

 any Physical Science was taught in any English public school.^ The one essential 

 thing for the exceptional boy is that he shall find within his reach chances to 

 take advantage of; chances of learning ; chances of practice ; and, over and above 

 all, chances of meeting great men. It takes me off my subject a little, but I 

 should like here to illustrate this matter from my own personal experience. 



I had already been an apprentice for four years at the Lagan Foundry when I 

 entered Queen's College for a course of Civil Engineering. I suppose that there 

 never was on this earth a college so poorly equipped for a course of engineering 

 study. Even the lecture-room — this lecture-room in which you are now sitting — 

 was borrowed from the Physics Professor. There was a narrow passage, ironically 

 called a ' Drawing Room,' and this was the only space reserved for engineering in a 

 town whose engineering work was even then very important. There were some 

 theodolites and levels and chains for surveying, but nothing else in the way of 

 apparatus. But there was as Professor a man of very great individuality ; he 

 acted as President of this Section twenty -eight years ago. I can hardly express 

 my obligations to Professor James Thomson. It was my good fortune to be a 

 pupil both of this great man and of his younger brother Lord Kelvin, as well as 

 of Dr. Andrews. It is not because these tliree men were born in Belfast that we 

 here call them great. It is not because Tait, late of Edinburgh, and Purser, now 

 the President of Section A, were professors at this College that we call them great 

 All the scientific men of the world are agreed to call these men very great indeed. 

 To come in contact with any of them, even for a little while, as a student altered 

 for ever one's attitude to Nature. It was not that they gave us information, 

 knowledge, facts. The syllabuses of their courses of .study were nothing like so 

 perfect as that of the smallest German polytechnic. And yet if a youth with a 

 liking for physical science had gone to a German Gymnasium to the age of nine- 

 teen, and had become a walking encyclopedia on leaving one's polytechnic at the 

 age of twenty-four, the course of that life-study would not have done for him as 

 much good as was done by a month's contact with one of these men. People call 

 it ' personal magnetism,' and think there is something occult about it. In truth, 

 they revealed to the student that he himself was a man, that mere learning was 

 unimportant, that one's own observation of some common phenomenon might lead 

 to important results unknown to the writers of books. They made one begin to 

 think for oneself for the first time. Let me give an example of how the thing 

 worked. 



James Thomson was known to me as the son of the author of my best 

 mathematical books, but more particularly as the man who had first used Carnot's 

 principle in combination with the discovery of Joule, and I often wondered why 

 Rankiue and Clausius and Kelvin got all the credit of the discovery of the second 

 law of thermodynamics. Men think of this work of his merely as having given 

 the first explanation of regelation of ice and the motion of glaciers. He was 

 known to me as the inventor of the Thomson Turbine and Centrifugal Pump and 

 Jet Pump. His name was to be found here and there in all my text-books, 

 always in connection with some thoroughly well-worked-out investigation, as it is 

 to be found in all good text-books now ; for wherever he left a subject, there that 

 subject has remained until this day ; nobody has added to it or found a mistake 

 in it. He was to me a very famous man, and yet he treated me as a fellow- 



' I once stated that my workshop at Clifton College in 1871 was the first school 

 workshop in England. I understand that this is a mistake ; there had been a work- 

 shop at Rossall for some years. But I believe I am right in saying that my 

 physical laboratory at Clifton was the first school laboratory in England. These 

 ideas were not mine ; they were those of the Headmaster, now the Bishop of Hereford. 



