12 R. THRELFALL. 
nor is a laboratory to be regarded as an expensive luxury to be 
blown away at the first breath of retrenchment. The time when 
the “Geist des Forschers” will be reverenced as the supreme 
weapon in the fight of mankind against the forces of nature is 
not yet, but it will surely come, and woe to that nation that 
learns it last. 
I turn toa very different personality in approaching Helm- 
holtz’s great pupil, the simple, gentle, kindly Heinrich Hertz. 
Nearly all the electrical work of importance of the last six 
years—for I do not include such things as dynamo making, or 
transformer testing—has been on the lines laid down by Hertz 
in his study of electro-magnetic waves. I do not propose to 
detain you here by referring to those researches, for I gave an 
account of them before the Australian Association for the 
Advancement of Science in 1890 at the Melbourne meeting, and 
shall have something to say about them again presently ; rather 
will I refer to the man himself. Hertz began life as an 
engineer, but his taste for physical work was too strong, and 
he gradually drifted into Helmholtz’s laboratory, where his 
powers were soon appreciated, and where he began that study 
of electro-magnetism which ended in persuading Continental 
philosophers of the truth of Maxwell’s mechanical theory of 
electricity. I say Continental philosophers advisedly ; for in 
England and America (for in this matter America is Rowland), 
the theory had taken firm root, and though Hertz supplied much 
interesting confirmation and opened up an experimental road of 
vast interest, it cannot be said that he did more then confirm 
what we had always believed. In character Hertz was probably 
one of the most kindly and gentle men that ever lived, and just 
as his work has that peculiar directness and simplicity that 
characterises the work of Faraday and of Darwin, so was he 
himself a man of much the same character—i.e., the highest 
reached by the human race. He died on New Year's Day, 1894, 
the brightest and best beloved of physicists. 
: On May 21st, 1894, there died August Kundt, Professor of 
Physics in Berlin, formerly in Strassburg. Though I expect his 
