NOVE.MBEE 14, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



765 



man iu 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 prac- 

 tice; 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 per- 

 sonal 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 bor- 

 rowed 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 im- 

 portant. There were some theodolites and 

 levels and chains for surveying, but noth- 

 ing else in the way of apparatus. But there 

 was as professor a man of very great indi- 

 viduality; 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 

 three men were born in Belfast that we 

 here call them great. It is not because Tait, 

 late of Edinburgh, and Purser, now the 



* 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 workshop at Eossall 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. 



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 forever 

 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 nineteen, 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 unimpor- 

 tant, that one's own observation of some 

 common phenomenon might lead to impor- 

 tant 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 Garnot's principle in 

 combination with the discovery of Joule, 

 and I often wondered why Rankine and 

 Clausius and Kelvin got all the credit of 

 the discovery of the second law of thermo- 

 dynamics. Men think of this work of his 

 merely as having given the first explana- 

 tion of regelation of ice and the motion of 

 glaciers. He was known to me as the in- 

 ventor of the Thomson turbine and centrif- 

 ugal pump and jet pump. His name was 

 to be found here and there in all my text- 

 books, always in connection with some thor- 

 oughly well-worked-out investigation, as it 



