498 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
Professor Tait. By Lord Kelvin. 
(Read December 2, 1901.) 
When Professor Tait last February resigned the chair of 
Natural Philosophy in the L T niversity of Edinburgh, we hoped 
that the immediate relief from strain and anxiety regarding his 
duty might conduce to a speedy recovery from the severe illness 
under which he was then suffering. I was indeed myself sanguine 
in looking forward to an unbroken continuation of the friendly 
intercourse with him which I had enjoyed through forty-one years 
of my life. A slight abatement of the graver symptoms, and a 
cheering return to some mathematical work left off six months 
before, gave hope that a change from George Square to Challenger 
Lodge in June, on the invitation of his friend and former pupil 
Sir John Murray, might be the beginning of a recovery. But it 
was not to be. Death came suddenly on the 4th of July, and our 
friend is gone from us. 
Peter Guthrie Tait was born at Dalkeith on 28th April 1831. 
After early education at Dalkeith Grammar School, and Circus 
Place School, Edinburgh, he entered the celebrated Edinburgh 
Academy, of which he remained a pupil till 1847, when he entered 
the University of Edinburgh. After a session there under Kelland 
and Forbes, he entered Cambridge in 1848 as an undergraduate of 
Peterhouse, and in 1852 he took his degree as Senior Wrangler and 
First Smith’s Prizeman, and was elected to a Fellowship of his 
College. He remained officially in Peterhouse as mathematical 
lecturer till 1854, when he was called to Queen’s College, Belfast, 
as Professor of Mathematics. This was a most happy appointment 
for Tait. It made him a colleague of, and co-worker on the 
electrolytic condensation of mixed oxygen and hydrogen and on 
ozone with Andrews, the discoverer of a procedure producing 
continuous change in a homogeneous substance, from liquid to 
gaseous and from gaseous to liquid condition. Through Andrews 
it introduced him to William Rowan Hamilton, the discoverer of 
