Читать книгу Lord Kelvin: An account of his scientific life and work - Andrew Gray - Страница 16

The incumbent of the Chair of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, Professor Meikleham, had been in failing health for several years, and from 1842 to 1845 his duties had been discharged by another member of the Thomson gens, Mr. David Thomson, B.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, afterwards Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen. Dr. Meikleham died in May 1846, and the Faculty thereafter proceeded on the invitation of Dr. J. P. Nichol, the Professor of Astronomy, to consider whether in consequence of the great advances of physical science during the preceding quarter of a century it was not urgently necessary to remodel the arrangements for the teaching of natural philosophy in the University. The advance of science had indeed been very great. Oersted and Ampère, Henry and Faraday and Regnault, Gauss and Weber, had made discoveries and introduced quantitative ideas, which had changed the whole aspect of experimental and mathematical physics. The electrical discoveries of the time reacted on the other branches of natural philosophy, and in no small degree on mathematics itself. As a result the progress of that period has continued and has increased in rapidity, until now the accumulated results, for the most part already united in the grasp of rational theory, have gone far beyond the power of any single man to follow, much less to master.

It is interesting to look into a course of lectures such as were usually delivered in the universities a hundred years ago by the Professor of Natural Philosophy. We find a little discussion of mechanics, hydrostatics and pneumatics, a little heat, and a very little optics. Electricity and magnetism, which in our day have a literature far exceeding that of the whole of physics only sixty years ago, could hardly be said to exist. The professor of the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Lord Kelvin's predecessor was appointed, apparently found himself quite free to devote a considerable part of each lecture to reflections on the beauties of nature, and to rhetorical flights fitter for the pulpit than for the physics lecture-table.

In the intervening time the form and fashion of scientific lectures has entirely changed, and the change is a testimony to the progress of science. It is visible even in the design of the apparatus. Microscopes, for example, have a perfection and a power undreamed of by our great-grandfathers, and they are supported on stands which lack the ornamentation of that bygone time, but possess stability and convenience. Everything and everybody—even the professor, if that be possible—must be business-like; and each moment of time must be utilised in experiments for demonstration, not for applause, and in brief and cogent statements of theory and fact. To waste time in talk that is not to the point is criminal. But withal there is need of grace of expression and vividness of description, of clearness of exposition, of imagination, even of poetical intuition: but the stern beauty of modern science is only disfigured by the old artificial adornments and irrelevancies.

This is the tone and temper of science at the present day: the task is immense, the time is short. And sixty years since some tinge of the same cast of thought was visible in scientific workers and teachers. The Faculty agreed with Dr. Nichol that there was need to bring physical teaching and equipment into line with the state of science at the time; but they wisely decided to do nothing until they had appointed a Professor of Natural Philosophy who would be able to advise them fully and in detail. They determined, however, to make the appointment subject to such alterations in the arrangements of the department as they might afterwards find desirable.

On September 11, 1846, the Faculty met, and having considered the resolutions which had been proposed by Dr. Nichol, resolved to the effect that the appointment about to be made should not prejudice the right of the Faculty to originate or support, during the incumbency of the new professor, such changes in the arrangements for conducting instruction in physical science as it might be expedient to adopt, and that this resolution should be communicated to the candidate elected. The minute then runs: "The Faculty having deliberated on the respective qualifications of the gentlemen who have announced themselves candidates for this chair, and the vote having been taken, it carried unanimously in favour of Mr. William Thomson, B.A., Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, and formerly a student of this University, who is accordingly declared to be duly elected: and Mr. Thomson being within call appeared in Faculty, and the whole of this minute having been read to him he agreed to the resolution of Faculty above recorded and accepted the office." It was also resolved as follows: "The Faculty hereby prescribe Mr. Thomson an essay on the subject, De caloris distributione per terræ corpus, and resolve that his admission be on Tuesday the 13th October, provided that he shall be found qualified by the Meeting and shall have taken the oath and made the subscriptions which are required by law."

At that time, and down to within the last fifteen years, every professor, before his induction to his chair, had to submit a Latin essay on some prescribed subject. This was almost the last relic of the customs of the days when university lectures were delivered in Latin, a practice which appears to have been first broken through by Adam Smith when Professor of Moral Philosophy. Whatever it may have been in the eighteenth century, the Latin essay at the end of the nineteenth was perhaps hardly an infallible criterion of the professor-elect's Latinity, and it was just as well to discard it. But fifty years before, and for long after, classical languages bulked largely in the curriculum of every student of the Scottish Universities, and it is undoubtedly the case that most of those who afterwards came to eminence in other departments of learning had in their time acquitted themselves well in the old Litteræ Humaniores. This was true, as we have seen, of Thomson, and it is unlikely that the form of his inaugural dissertation cost him much more effort than its matter.