460 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No.71» 



At laat divine Cecilia came, 



Inventress of the vocal frame; 



The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store. 



Enlarged the former narrow bounds 



With nature's mother-wit, and arts unknown 

 before. 



Let old Timotheus yield the prize. 



Or both divide the crown; 

 He raised a mortal to the skies, 



She drew an angel down. 



I doubt if any of my hearers who knew 

 Strachey by sight would recognize in him 

 the scientific reincarnation of St. Cecilia, 

 but it is none the less true that he was pre- 

 eminent among men in inventing the means 

 of drawing angels down and using their 

 service for the attuning of common life to 

 a scientific standard. It may be equally 

 hard for those who knew him to look upon 

 Eliot as a vocal frame, for of all his phys- 

 ical capacities his voice was the least im- 

 pressive; and yet it is not untrue to say 

 that he was conspicuously a medium by 

 which the celestial harmonies of the phys- 

 ical sciences were brought into touch with 

 the practical life of India through his 

 work, which is represented by a consider- 

 able number of the twenty volumes of 

 Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological 

 Service. 



I do not indulge in this poetic ex- 

 travagance without some underlying rea- 

 son. Speaking for the physics of the 

 atmosphere, there is a real distinction be- 

 tween these three sides of scientific work. 

 To some is given the power of the mathe- 

 matician or the physicist to raise the 

 mortal to the skies, to solve some problem 

 which, if not in itself a meteorological one, 

 still has a bearing, sooner or later to be 

 discovered and developed, upon the work- 

 ing of atmospheric phenomena. It is easy 

 enough to cite illustrious examples : among 

 notable instances there recur to my mind 

 Eayleigh's work on the color of the sky 

 and Pernter's meteorological optics; papers 



by Ferrel and others on the general cir- 

 culation of the atmosphere; Kelvin and 

 Rayleigh on the elastic oscillations of the 

 atmosphere; the papers by Hagen, Helm- 

 holtz, Oberbeck, Margules, Hertz and Von 

 Bezold on the dynamics and thermody- 

 namics of the atmosphere, collected and 

 translated by Cleveland Abbe ; the work on 

 atmospheric absorption by Langley and 

 the theoretical papers on radiation by 

 Poynting; those on condensation nuclei by 

 Aitken and Wilson, and the recent work 

 on atmospheric electricity, including the 

 remarkable paper by Wilson on the quiet 

 transference of electricity from the air to 

 the ground. 



But these things are not of themselves 

 applied to the meteorology of every-day 

 life. It is, in a way, a separate sense, 

 given to few, to realize the possibilities that 

 may result from the solution of new theo- 

 retical problems, from the invention of 

 new methods— to grasp, in fact, the idea 

 of bringing the angels down. And, in 

 order that the regular workers in such 

 matters may be in a position constantly to 

 reap the advantages which men of genius 

 provide, the vocal frame must have its 

 permanent embodiment. For the advance- 

 ment of science in this sense we require all 

 three— the professor with academic free- 

 dom to illuminate with his genius any phe- 

 nomenon which he may be pleased to in- 

 vestigate, the administrator, face to face 

 with the practical problems in which sci- 

 ence can help, and the living voice which 

 can tune itself in harmony with the ad- 

 vances of science and in sympathy with the 

 needs of the people whom it serves. 



The true relations of these matters are 

 not always apparent. Eliot, bringing to 

 the work of the Indian Meteorological 

 Office a mind trained in the mathematical 

 school of which Kelvin was a most con- 

 spicuous exponent, achieved a remarkable 



