802 
Our friend was born with a powerful 
mind, and the older he grew the more 
powerful it appeared to those who knew 
him intimately and to those most capable 
of understanding the problems and the 
methods which engaged his thoughts. 
Others may have eyes as keen and fingers 
as facile, but his vision and his dexterity 
were controlled by a brain of extraordinary 
fineness, versatility and strength. No- 
body could walk with him, hunt with him, 
sail with him, talk with him, work with 
him, without perceiving his firm grasp, 
his clear aim, his concentrated energy, his 
extraordinary powers. In early youth his 
mind was directed to the study of nature— 
not so much to plants and animals as to 
physical and chemical forces. This was 
the bent of his life. It is true that he was 
fond of music, classical music especially— 
Chopin’s funeral march, for example—and 
he loved good works of art—the Madonnas 
of Raphael, for example. 
Yet he cared but little for literature, 
having showed, in his early days, a boyish 
animosity toward Greek and Latin which 
he never wholly overcame. Aristotle was 
no authority to him. But the mysterious 
forces of the physical world—gravitation, 
sound, light, heat, electricity and magnet- 
ism—were his constant study. The prin- 
ciples of mechanics were to him of funda- 
mental importance, and mathematics was 
subservient to all his investigations. In 
this broad field he was a reader, a student, 
an experimenter, an inventor, a discoverer, 
a philosopher. He knew how to ask a dif- 
ficult and far-reaching question, and he 
knew how to seek the answer. 
Extraneous considerations were excluded 
when he saw the point of an inquiry, and 
on that point he concentrated all his powers. 
For example, when he began the brilliant 
series of experiments in spectrography 
which made him peerless in this domain, he 
saw that the spectrum depended on the ac- 
SCLENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. XIII. No. 334. 
curacy of the gratings, and the gratings on 
the dividing engine, and the dividing en- 
gine on the screw—so he began the study 
of light by devising and making a screw 
more exact than any screw that has ever 
been produced by the most accomplished 
makers of instruments of precision, and 
then he saw that photography must be im- 
proved before he could reveal to the eye of 
others the intricacy of the solar spectrum. 
His intellectual apparatus was controlled 
by a powerful will. When he was deter- 
mined upon a given course, no regard for 
consequences, no apprehension of perils or 
of difficulties, no dread of failure, proved 
a barrier. They heightened his zest. For- 
tunately his ends were noble and his pro- 
ceedings wise, so that rarely, if ever, did 
failure disappoint him or weaken his self- 
confidence. He would have been a great 
soldier, a great explorer, a great lawyer. 
But above his keen perceptions, his logic, 
his adaptation of means to ends, and his 
marvelous concentration, I must place an- 
other moral quality—one that appeals to 
every one of us, whether we understand 
his determination of the mechanical equiva- 
lent of heat, or the steps by which he ar- 
rived at the value of the ohm. This moral 
quality is the love of truth. Of course, he 
was true in all the ordinary relations of 
life. That is the beginning of truth, but 
not the end of it. He was also true in all 
his investigations, careful to eliminate 
errors, to avoid preconceptions, to shrink 
from hasty conclusions and inferences, to 
be critical of other investigations, to be ac- 
curate, exact, conscientious, to spare no 
pains, to shrink from no efforts, to conceal 
no difficulties, in order that the absolute 
facts might be established, so far as this 
can be done by limited humanity. To him 
science was another word for truth—not 
all the truth, but that amount of truth 
which the limited powers of man have dis- 
covered. He was a follower of Isaac New- 
