620 ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR LOVERING. 
stone and the readers whom he addressed were misled by the orig- 
inal facts. Few men, who have rendered signal services to science, 
and who have finally reached the highest pinnacle of fame, have 
suffered more from poverty and neglect, and waited longer for a 
recognition of their merits, than the modest student of Nuremberg. 
The slender volume which will perpetuate his name was indeed 
published at Berlin in 1827, and antedates Wheatstone’s experi- 
ment by seven years. But the book was treated with contempt 
by a minister of state, to whom Ohm presented a copy, at his 
university of Cologne, and was first brought to the notice of 
English readers in 1841, when an English translation of it was 
effected through the agency of the British Association, and the 
Copley medal was presented to Ohm by the Royal Society of 
London. As late as 1860, when the same work was rendered into 
French, the translator admits that the mathematical theory of Ohm 
on the galvanic cireuit, the elements of which have since rapidly 
circulated in popular text-books, was almost unknown in France, 
that high seat of science. If the serene but steady light of math- 
ematics had not been dimmed by the blaze of experimental suc- 
cesses, and the teachings of Ohm had been heeded sooner, the 
science of electricity. would have been the gainer, and the men 
of science would have been saved the mortification of treating the 
electromagnetic telegraph as an impracticability. 
When Wheatstone was a candidate to fill a vacancy among the 
corresponding members of the French Institute, it was objected 
that he had only made a brilliant experiment, but had not discov- 
ered a new principle. Arago came to his rescue and asserted thet 
he had introduced a powerful and fertile method of experimentation 
which would be felt in other sciences besides electricity. The 
French physicist lost no time in devising means for making 
these claims. If it could be proved experimentally that the ve- 
locity of light was greater in air than in water a capital fact 1m 
the contending theories of light would be settled forever. Arago 
planned the experiment and pressed its feasibility upon the Acad- 
emy of Sciences with all the power and eloquence of his natur® 
At last he roused two younger physicists to undertake what is 
growing infirmities prevented him from doing with his own hands. 
The result declared in favor of undulations, and a fatal blow was 
dealt to the corpuscular theory of light which had vexed science 
since the days of Newton. If Fizean and Foucault drew their 1- 
