VII End of Studies at the University of Cambridge
When I returned to Cambridge from little Idvor I often thought of my mother’s words saying that I was living among the saints of Cambridge. These words sounded like the language which the minstrel of the old Serbian ballads would have used, to convey the meaning which she wished to convey. Whenever I saw one of the great dons of Cambridge, like the famous mathematician Cayley, or the still more famous mathematical physicist George Gabriel Stokes, the discoverer of fluorescence, I asked myself: “Are they the saints of Cambridge?” The answer was in the negative; most of these men were too mobile to pass for saints. One of them, for instance, although quite old and blind, was the stroke of a boat which was very prominent on the river Cam. Its crew consisted of Cambridge dons. When this aged stroke was not rowing he was riding a spirited horse, usually galloping briskly, with his young daughter chasing alongside of him, her long golden hair, like that of a valkyrie, lashing the air as she made strenuous efforts to keep up with her speedy father. It was impossible to associate one’s idea of saints with men of that type. But, nevertheless, my mother was right: Cambridge had its saints; their memory was the great glory of Cambridge.
Nature, published in London, was then, as it is to-day, the most popular scientific weekly in the United Kingdom. Many scientists of Cambridge used it as a medium for discussing in a popular way the current scientific events of the day. Among the files of Nature, which I consulted often, I found once a beautiful steel engraving of Faraday, together with a brief account of Faraday’s work. It was written by Maxwell, as I found out later. Speaking of the activity of teachers of science, the writer said that they are expected “to bring the student into contact with two main sources of mental growth, the fathers of sciences, for whose personal influence over the opening mind there is no substitute, and the material things to which their labors first gave meaning.” In the light of this thought I saw that in his two little classics, “Matter and Motion” and “Theory of Heat,” Maxwell had brought me into contact with the fathers of dynamical sciences, and that La Grange, in his “Méchanique Analytique,” had shown me the men who were the fathers of the science of dynamics, and that for this service I owed them everlasting gratitude.
Jim, the humble fireman in the Cortlandt Street factory, told me once: “This country, my lad, is a monument to the lives of men of brains and character and action who made it.” From that day on the name “United States of America” recalled to my mind Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Lincoln, and the other great men who are universally regarded as the fathers of this country; and when I learned to know and to appreciate them I felt that I was qualified to consider myself a part of this country. Maxwell and La Grange had taught me that Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Carnot, Helmholtz, and other great investigators had made the dynamical sciences; and from that time on these sciences like monuments recalled to my mind the names of the men who made them. I never saw a man handling a crowbar without remembering that it was the historic lever which in the philosophy of Archimedes served as the earliest foundation for the science of statics. The word force always recalled the picture of Galileo dropping heavy bodies from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and watching their uniformly accelerated motions, produced by the force which was impelling the falling body to the earth. The picture reminded me that by these ideally simple experiments Galileo had banished forever the mediæval superstition that bodies fall because they are afraid of the vacuum above, and had substituted in its place the simple law of accelerating force, which prepared the foundation for the science of dynamics. I never saw a moving train being brought to a standstill by the frictional reactions of the brakes without seeing in my imagination the image of Newton formulating his great law of equality between physical actions and physical reactions, the crowning point of modern dynamics. These pictures illustrated what Maxwell meant when he spoke of the material things to which the labors of Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton gave a meaning, and when I caught that meaning I felt that I was no longer a stranger in the land of science. Their highest meaning, I knew, was the recognition that the truth which they conveyed was a part only of what my mother called the “Eternal Truth.”
My work in Cambridge, guided principally by Maxwell and La Grange, reminded me, therefore, continually of the fathers of the sciences which I was studying and of the material things to which their labors gave a meaning. These thoughts gave me a satisfactory interpretation of my mother’s words: “Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth; it is filled with icons of the great saints of science. The contemplation of their saintly work will enable you to communicate with the spirit of eternal truth.” My description of the scientific activity of Cambridge had produced this image in her mind, which was dominated by a spirit of piety and of reverence. This spirit, I always thought, is needed in science just as much as it is in religion. It was the spirit of Maxwell and of La Grange.
The atmosphere of Cambridge was most favorable to the cultivation of a spirit of reverence in scientific thought. At that time, just as to-day, Newton’s name was the glory of Trinity College, and the name of Darwin was regarded with the same feeling of reverence at Christ College. Every college at Cambridge had at least one great name which was the glory of that college. These, one may say, were the names of the patron saints of Cambridge; their spirit was present everywhere, and its influence was certainly wonderful. It reminded me of my mother’s words: “May God be praised forever for the blessings which you have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy in your life among the saints of Cambridge.”
It may seem strange that a Cambridge student of science should have worried so much about interpreting his pious mother’s words in terms of his expanding scientific knowledge. But that student was once a Serb peasant in whose early childhood the old Serbian ballads were his principal spiritual food. The central figure of these ballads was Prince Marko, the national hero, who at critical moments of his tempestuous life never appealed for aid to any man. When he needed counsel he asked it from his aged mother Yevrosima, and when he needed help in combat he appealed to Vila Raviyoyla, Marko’s adopted sister, the greatest of all the fairies of the clouds. A mother can have a wonderful influence over her boy whose early mental attitude is moulded by impressions of that kind. When she has that influence, then she is her boy’s oracle, and no amount of subsequent scientific training will disturb that relationship.
I often think of an old idea which I first conceived while a student at Cambridge. It is this: Our American colleges and universities should have days consecrated to the memories of what Maxwell called the fathers of the sciences, like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, Helmholtz. I mention these names, having physical sciences in mind, but similar names can be mentioned in other departments of human knowledge. Why should not science follow the beautiful example of religion, which has its saints’ days? On these memorial days, say Newton’s birthday, an address on Newton and his work should tell the young student why Newton is the father of the science of dynamics. Dynamics is not a mere collection of inexorable physical laws which to a young student often sound like dry scientific facts and mute formulæ. Many text-books, unfortunately, represent it that way. It is a record of the life-work of men who lived human lives and became what my mother called “saints of science,” because they devoted their life-efforts to the deciphering of divine messages which, through physical phenomena, God addresses to man. The young mind should know as early as possible that dynamics had its origin in the heavens, in the motions of heavenly bodies, and that it was brought to earth by Galileo and Newton when they had deciphered the meaning of the divine message conveyed to them by these celestial motions. The Greeks of old sacrificed to their gods a hecatomb of oxen whenever one of their philosophers discovered a new theorem in geometry, and the philosopher’s memory was praised forever. The modern nations should not remain indifferent to the memory of the “saints of science,” whose discoveries have advanced so much the physical and the spiritual welfare of man. My life among the saints of Cambridge suggested this idea, and my students, past and present, know that I have always been loyal to it, because I always believed that in this manner every American college and university could raise an invisible “temple consecrated to the eternal truth” and fill it with “icons of the great saints of science.” A spirit of reverence for the science which the student is studying should be cultivated from the very start. I observed that spirit among my friends, the mathematical tripos men, at Cambridge; it was there as a part of local traditions. I certainly felt its influence, and the longer I stayed at Cambridge the more I felt convinced that “Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth.” This enabled me to recognize while still at Cambridge that nothing was more characteristic of the mental attitude of many scientific men in America and in England at that time than their reverence for the “saints of science” and their strong desire to build great temples “consecrated to the eternal truth.” Maxwell was one of their leaders, and the best illustration of that mental attitude. I have already referred to this in my short allusion to the Cambridge craving for scientific research, and I shall now attempt to describe a much wider intellectual movement of which this craving was a local manifestation only. I felt the force of its current during my Cambridge days, and I recognize to-day that at that time I moved along following more or less unconsciously the stream-lines of this current.
The completion of the mathematical training under Routh recommended by Niven was approaching its end, and I was satisfied with its results. I could follow without much effort the lectures of Stokes and Lord Rayleigh, and I could handle the mathematics of Maxwell’s theory of electricity with considerable ease; but I did not understand his physics.
President Barnard, of Columbia College, said once in an address of fifty years ago that a young student in America at that time lacked a “knowledge of visible things and not information about them—knowledge acquired by the learner’s own conscious efforts, not crammed into his mind in set forms of words out of books.” His statement fitted admirably my own case; I lacked that knowledge of visible things which one gets from his own conscious efforts; I had no knowledge of physics acquired from my own conscious efforts in a physical laboratory. Neither Columbia College nor any other college in the United States, with very few exceptions, offered at that time this opportunity to the student. I suspected that this was the real secret of my inability to understand Maxwell’s physics; I longed for work in a real physical laboratory and made preparations to enter the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. But I learned, in the beginning of 1885, that Lord Rayleigh had given up the directorship of this laboratory, and that a Mr. J.J. Thomson of Trinity College had been appointed as his successor, the same Thomson who is to-day Sir John Joseph Thomson, Master of Trinity College, and the leading physicist in the world. The new director was only twenty-eight years of age in the year of his appointment—at the end of 1884. Although a second wrangler in the mathematical tripos test of 1880, he was four years later already a sufficiently famous experimental physicist to be appointed director of the Cavendish Laboratory. The new director was only two years older than myself, but he was already a famous experimental physicist, whereas I had never had a physical apparatus in my hand. What will he think of me, thought I, when I present myself to him and ask for permission to work as a mere beginner in the Cavendish Laboratory! I blushed when I thought of it, and I was afraid that I should blush even more when he compared me to his younger students who had already acquired much skill in physical manipulations. The failure of my competition with boys and girls in the speed tests of punching biscuits in the Cortlandt Street cracker factory came back to my memory; and I bemoaned, just as I did in Cortlandt Street nine years before, my hard luck of having had no earlier training. Many an American college student of physics bemoaned in those days his lack of early laboratory training. When I say this I am touching the principal point of my narrative; it is the point at which my narrative begins to sail on the back of a wave which started actually when Johns Hopkins University was organized, in 1876, but the motive power of which had been gathering long before that, perhaps at the same time when the motive power of the Cambridge movement in favor of scientific research was gathering, resulting, as it had, in the establishment of the Cavendish Laboratory. But I must resume the thread of my story and return later to the point just mentioned.
My lack of what Barnard called “knowledge of visible things... acquired by the learner’s own conscious efforts...” gave me much anxiety; and I often thought that it would, perhaps, be better to go to some other university where the director of the physical laboratory was an older man, who would not notice my age as much as would the new and extremely young director of the Cavendish Laboratory. That thought, however, did not console me much, because I was very much attached to Cambridge and did not wish to give up what my mother called “life among the saints of Cambridge.” Just then, as if by an act of kind providence, a letter from President Barnard of Columbia College reached me, enclosing a letter of introduction to John Tyndall, the famous physicist, colleague and successor of Faraday in the direction of the Royal Institution. Barnard informed me that Columbia had received a generous sum of money from Tyndall, representing a part of the net proceeds from his famous course of public lectures on light, which he had delivered in the United States in 1872–1873; that the income of this sum would be given as a fellowship to a Columbia graduate to assist him in his study of experimental physics; that the fellowship would be called a John Tyndall Fellowship, netting over five hundred dollars annually; and that he and Rood, professor of physics at Columbia, considered me a suitable candidate. Unexpected things of this kind happen every now and then, and when they do they certainly encourage the belief that there is such a thing as luck.
I called on Tyndall without much delay, and delivered Barnard’s letter of introduction. One may imagine how I felt when I saw and spoke to the very man whose descriptions of physical phenomena had been the first to disclose to me on the top loft of the Cortlandt Street factory the poetical side of the physical sciences. I expected to find a scientist looking like a poet and a dreamer, but I did not. He looked exactly what he was: a plain and benevolent Irishman. I had seen many an old Irishman, among my New York friends and acquaintances, who looked exactly as Tyndall looked; and when he spoke there was also the fire, the vigor, and the humor of the agile Irish mind. In less than the time it takes to tell this he made me feel that I had always known him, and that he was my old and generous friend. His questions were wonderfully direct, just as direct, I thought, as the questions which he addressed to physical phenomena when in his famous lectures he was deciphering their hidden meaning. He deciphered me very quickly, I thought, as if I were the simplest physical phenomenon which he had ever observed. The fact, however, that I held his attention encouraged me. He apparently attached no very great importance to my lack of early training in experimental physics, but advised me to avoid further delay. He informed me, by way of encouraging me, that he was over thirty when he took his doctor’s degree at the University of Marburg, in Germany. A lack of early advantages, he thought, could always be overcome by redoubling one’s efforts in later years. His own career proved that. He called my attention to a short account of the work of the famous Helmholtz, written for Nature by no less a man, he said, than great Maxwell. This story, he thought, would show me that the great professor at the University of Berlin did not have early advantages in experimental physics, and that he became a professor of physics when he was already fifty years of age. He encouraged me to apply for the new fellowship at Columbia as soon as it became operative, and to make up my mind quickly to migrate to the best physical laboratory that I could find. I asked him what laboratory he would recommend and he again directed my attention to Maxwell’s account of the work of Helmholtz. When I was about to leave, promising, at his request, to call again, he gave me a copy of his lectures on light, which he had delivered in the United States thirteen years before. “Read them,” he said, “and when you come again I shall be glad to discuss with you some of the points of this little book; they will explain to you the full meaning of President Barnard’s letter, and of its historical background. Read also volume VIII of Nature.”
I had read Tyndall’s lectures on light before I entered Columbia College, but upon reading them again I found there very many things which I had missed before. They did not, of course, describe satisfactorily the physical properties of the luminiferous ether—no lectures ever did—but they did describe, I thought, a bit of the history of physical sciences in the United States which was a revelation to me, and was, as I know now, a most important contribution to the history of the development of scientific thought in the United States. It deserves a prominent place in this narrative, because I had been a witness of this development during the past forty years.
Joseph Henry, the most distinguished American physicist, together with other distinguished American scientists, among them President Barnard of Columbia College, invited Tyndall, in 1872, to deliver a course of lectures in some of the principal cities in the United States. The object of these lectures was, quoting Tyndall’s words, “to show the uses of experiment in the cultivation of natural knowledge,” hoping that this “would materially promote scientific education in this country.” Tyndall delivered his famous course of six lectures on light in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. Joseph Henry, as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and president of the National Academy of Sciences, took them under his personal direction. The success of these lectures surpassed even the most sanguine expectations. At the farewell dinner to Tyndall some of the wisest scientific intellects of the land were heard, and their words indicated clearly what was the uppermost thought in the minds of the scientific men of the United States when they invited Tyndall. I quote here some of the words spoken by these men.
President Barnard of Columbia, the first American expounder of the undulatory theory of light, said:
I say, then, that our long-established and time-honored system of liberal education... does not tend to form original investigators of nature’s truths....
Among the great promoters of scientific progress... how large is the number who may, in strict propriety, be said to have educated themselves? Take, for illustration, such familiar names as those of William Herschel, and Franklin, and Rumford, and Rittenhouse, and Davy, and Faraday, and Henry. Is it not evident that nature herself, to those who will follow her teachings, is a better guide to the study of her own phenomena than all the training of our schools? And is not this because nature invariably begins with the training of the observing faculties?
The moral of this experience is, that mental culture is not secured by pouring information into passive recipients; it comes from stimulating the mind to gather knowledge for itself.... If we would fit man properly to cultivate nature... our earliest teachings must be things and not words.
Doctor John William Draper, the world-renowned American investigator of the laws of radiation from hot bodies, said:
Nowhere in the world are to be found more imposing political problems than those to be settled here; nowhere a greater need of scientific knowledge. I am not speaking of ourselves alone, but also of our Canadian friends on the other side of the St. Lawrence. We must join together in generous emulation of the best that is done in Europe.... Together we must try to refute what De Tocqueville has said about us, that communities such as ours can never have a love of pure science.
Andrew White, President of Cornell, said:
I will confine myself to the value, in our political progress, of the spirit and example of some of the scientific workers of our day and generation. What is the example which reveals that spirit? It is an example of zeal, zeal in search for the truth... of thoroughness—of the truth sought in its wholeness... of bravery, to brave all outcry and menace... of devotion to duty without which no scientific work can be accomplished... of faith that truth and goodness are inseparable.
The reverence for scientific achievement, the revelation of the high honors which are in store for those who seek for truth in science—the inevitable comparison between a life devoted to the great pure search, on the one hand, and a life devoted to place-hunting or self-grasping on the other—all these shall come to the minds of thoughtful men in lonely garrets of our cities, in remote cabins of our prairies, and thereby shall come strength and hope for higher endeavor.
Tyndall responded in part as follows:
It would be a great thing for this land of incalculable destinies to supplement its achievements in the industrial arts by those higher investigations from which our mastery over nature and over industrial art itself has been derived.... To no other country is the cultivation of science, in its highest form, of more importance than to yours. In no other country would it exert a more benign and elevating influence.... Let chairs be founded, sufficiently but not luxuriously endowed, which shall have original research for their main object and ambition.... The willingness of American citizens to throw their fortunes into the cause of public education is, as I have already stated, without parallel in my experience. Hitherto their efforts have been directed to the practical side of science.... But assuredly among your men of wealth there are those willing to listen to an appeal on higher grounds.... It is with the view of giving others the chance that I enjoyed,[I cannot find a reason for this comma, it results in a pause where there should not be one] among my noble and disinterested German teachers, that I propose, after deducting, with strict accuracy, the sums which have been actually expended on my lectures, to devote every cent of the money which you have so generously poured in upon me to the education of young American philosophers in Germany.
What a splendid example to the men of wealth to whom Tyndall was appealing! We shall see later that the appeal was not made in vain.
But the sentiments expressed at this dinner were echoes, only, of Tyndall’s thundering voice, to which America listened spellbound when he delivered the last of his course of six lectures on light. In the last part of this lecture, called “Summary and Conclusions,” he first erected what my mother would have called “a temple consecrated to the eternal truth” which we call light, and in that temple he placed what she would have called “the icons of the saints of the science” of light. The names of Alhazan, Vitellio, Roger Bacon, Kepler, Snellius, Newton, Thomas Young, Fresnel, Stokes, and Kirchhoff stood there like so many icons of saints which one sees on the altars of orthodox churches. In this he surpassed, I thought, even Maxwell and La Grange, and that was saying a great deal. He stood in the middle of that temple and challenged the statement once made by De Tocqueville that “the man of the North has not only experience but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.” Tyndall proceeded to draw a clear distinction between science and its applications, pointing out that technical education without original investigations will “lose all force and growth, all power of reproduction,” just “as surely as a stream dwindles when the spring dies out.” “The original investigator,” said Tyndall, “constitutes the fountainhead of knowledge. It belongs to the teacher to give this knowledge the requisite form; an honorable and often difficult task. But it is a task which receives its final sanctification when the teacher himself honestly tries to add a rill to the great stream of scientific discovery. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with nature. We may, it is true, have good and instructive lectures from men of ability, the whole of whose knowledge is second-hand, just as we may have good and instructive sermons from intellectually able and unregenerate men. But for that power of science which corresponds to what the Puritan fathers would call experimental religion in the heart, you must ascend to the original investigator.”
Many more passages could be quoted from Tyndall’s “Summary and Conclusions” of his American lectures. Suffice it to say here that the cause of scientific research in this country never had a more eloquent advocate than Tyndall. The message which he delivered in his American lecture tour in 1872–1873 was heard and heeded in every part of the United States and of the British Empire. It is no exaggeration to say that the response to this call was the movement for scientific research in American colleges and universities which dates from those memorable years. It was in its earliest days under the leadership of the famous Joseph Henry, President Barnard, and other American scientists who had associated themselves in the National Academy of Sciences which was chartered by an act of Congress in 1863.
I shall try to show in the course of this narrative that it was the greatest intellectual movement in the United States, producing results of which nobody could even have dreamed fifty years ago; and the end is not yet in sight.
Tyndall had called my attention to volume VIII of Nature. The article on Faraday I had read before, but there were a large number of other communications advocating strongly the stimulation of scientific research in colleges and universities. Tyndall’s “Summary and Conclusions” had aroused a deep interest in my mind for these things, and besides, they furnished a most welcome sidelight upon the Cambridge movement which, as described above, I had felt before I met Tyndall. The University of Cambridge was severely criticised in these communications by some Cambridge dons themselves on account of the alleged entire absence of the scientific research stimulus. One of these criticisms is so characteristic of the feeling of Cambridge in 1873 that it deserves a special reference. It is in volume VIII of Nature and is entitled: “A Voice from Cambridge.” A very brief abstract follows:
It is known all over the world that science is all but dead in England. By science, of course, we mean that searching for new knowledge which is its own reward.... It is also known that science is perhaps deadest of all at our universities. Let any one compare Cambridge, for instance, with any German university; nay, with even some provincial offshoots of the University of France.... What, then, do the universities do? They perform the functions, for too many of their students, of first-grade schools merely, and that in a manner about which opinions are divided; and superadded to these is an enormous examining engine, on the most approved Chinese model, always at work....
Not even President Barnard could have uttered a more severe criticism! The most forcible appeal was made by the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its meeting in Bradford, in September, 1873. This I also found in volume VIII of Nature. These stirring appeals were published several months after Tyndall’s lecture tour in the United States, and they all sounded to me like so many echoes of the thundering voice with which he delivered the “Summary and Conclusions” of his American lectures.
These studies, recommended by Tyndall, gave me a view of science which I did not have before. I caught a glimpse of it from the books of Maxwell and La Grange, to which I referred above. The realms of science are a strange land to a youth who enters them, just as the United States was a strange land to me when I landed at Castle Garden. Maxwell, La Grange, and Tyndall were the first to teach me how to catch the spirit of the strange land of science, and when I caught it I felt as confident as I did in Cortlandt Street after I had read and understood the early historical documents of the United States. I knew that soon I should be able to apply for citizenship in that great state called science. These were the thoughts which I carried with me when I started out for my second visit to Tyndall.
When I called on Tyndall again, a month or so after my first visit, I took along a definite plan for my future work. This pleased him, because he had advised me that every youth must think through his own head, the same advice which was given me some years later by Professor Willard Gibbs, of Yale. I assured Tyndall that my second reading of the “Summary and Conclusions,” his sixth American lecture, had cleared my vision, and that I knew perfectly what my next step should be. He was much amused when I told him how, eighteen months before, I had wandered into Cambridge like a goose into a fog, and asked me where I got that expression. I told him that it was a Serbian saying, and he looked perfectly surprised when I told him that I was a Serb by birth.
“Well, I did not decipher you as quickly as you said I did. I thought,” said he, referring to my habit of emphasizing the sound of the letter r in my pronunciation, “that you were a native American of Scotch ancestry.” “Why not of Irish?” asked I, entering into his jocose mood. “Ah, my young friend,” said he, with a merry twinkle in his eye, “you are too deliberate and too cautious to suggest the Irish type. I do not know what I would have thought had I seen you when you wandered into Cambridge ‘like a goose into a fog.’”
He was evidently much impressed by my careful analysis of his “Summary and Conclusions” and of its effect upon the minds of American and English scientists. Seeing that he enjoyed informal conversation and encouraged it, I told him of my Alpine experiences in Switzerland and of the anxiety I caused to my English acquaintance because I was far from being “too deliberate and too cautious.” “Well,” said he, “I might have suspected an Irish ancestry if I had met you in Switzerland twenty months ago. But you have changed wonderfully since that time, and if you keep it up the goose that came to Cambridge may be quite a swan when it departs from Cambridge.”
I informed Tyndall that Maxwell’s glowing account of Helmholtz, which I had seen in Campbell’s life of Maxwell, and in Nature, to which he had referred me, had decided me to migrate from Cambridge to Berlin and take up the study of experimental physics in Helmholtz’s famous laboratory. He looked pleased, and referring good-naturedly to my goose simile again, he said jokingly: “You are no longer a goose in a fog. Let Helmholtz decide whether you are a swan or not.” Then, growing more serious, he added: “You will find in the Berlin laboratory the very things which my American and British friends and I should like to see in operation in all college and university laboratories in America and in the British Empire. In this respect the Germans have been leading the world for over forty years, and they have been splendid leaders.” This, then, was the reason, I thought, why, twelve years before, Tyndall said to his New York friends: “I propose... to devote every cent of the money which you have so generously poured in upon me to the education of young American philosophers in Germany.”
I ventured to address to the very informal Tyndall the following informal question: “Since in your opinion I am no longer a goose in a fog, you will have no objection if I apply to the Columbia authorities to send me as their ‘young American philosopher,’ as their first Tyndall fellow, to Berlin, will you?” “No, my friend,” said he, “I have already urged you to do so. Remember, however, that a Tyndall fellow must never permit himself to wander like a goose in a fog, but must strive to carry his head high up like a swan, his body floating upon the clear waters of stored-up human knowledge, and his vision, mounted on high, searching for new communications with the spirit of eternal truth, as your mother expressed it so well.” He liked my mother’s expressions, “temple consecrated to the eternal truth,” and “the icons of the great saints of science.”
I will add here that Tyndall’s mental attitude toward science appeared to me to be the same as my mother’s mental attitude toward religion. God was the great spiritual background of her religion, and the works of the prophets and of the saints were, according to her faith, the only sources from which the human mind can draw the light which will illuminate this great spiritual background. Hence, as I said before, her fondness for and her remarkable knowledge of the words of the prophets and the lives of saints. The “eternal truth” was, according to my understanding at that time, the sacred background of Tyndall’s scientific faith, and the works of the great scientific discoverers, their lives, and their methods of inquiry into physical phenomena were the only sources from which the human mind can draw the light which will illuminate that sacred background. He nourished that faith with a religious devotion, and his appeals in the name of that faith were irresistible. His friends in America and in England, who were glad to have him as their advocate of the cause of scientific research, had the same faith that he had, and they nourished it with the same religious devotion. I know to-day, and I suspected it at that time, that this faith was kindled and kept alive in the hearts of those men both here and in the British Empire by the light of the life and of the wonderful discoveries of Michael Faraday, and by the prophetic vision which led this great scientist to his discoveries. He was their contemporary and his achievements, like a great search-light, showed them the true path of scientific progress.
My last visit to Tyndall took place toward the end of the last, that is, the Easter, term, and when I returned to Cambridge I informed my friends that at the end of the term I would migrate to Berlin. It was not necessary for me to assure them how badly I felt to leave what they often heard me call “the saints and the sacred precincts of Cambridge”; they knew of my reverence for the place and they also knew my reasons for that reverence. They understood my reverent devotion to the memory of Newton, but they did not quite understand my similar devotion to the memory of Maxwell. How could they? None of his classics were necessary in order to solve the problems usually served before the candidates for the mathematical tripos honors. Neither could they understand my admiration for La Grange, who, in their opinion, was only an imperfect interpreter of Newton. Helmholtz they appreciated more, but the exalted opinion which Maxwell had of Helmholtz had not yet penetrated among my mathematical chums at Cambridge. They were sorry to lose me, they said, but they did not envy me, because they did not see that Berlin had anything which Cambridge did not have. This never was the opinion of Maxwell and it was not at that time the opinion of Tyndall.
Tyndall was the only physicist that I had ever met who had known Faraday personally. He was Faraday’s co-worker in the Royal Institution for many years, and to him and Maxwell I owe my earliest knowledge of Faraday’s wonderful personality. Tyndall conducted me into that knowledge by word of mouth, and his conversation about Faraday’s personality and scientific temperament thrilled me. I told him that I had bought in a Cambridge second-hand book-shop three volumes of Faraday’s “Electrical Researches” for three shillings, and Tyndall remarked: “Faraday is still quite cheap at Cambridge.” Then, after some meditation, he added: “Read them; their story is just as new and as stirring to-day as it was when these volumes were first printed. They will help you much to interpret Maxwell.” He presented me with a copy of his story, “Faraday as a Discoverer,” which closes with the words:
“Just and faithful knight of God.”
In this book Tyndall drew the same picture of Faraday which Campbell had given me of Maxwell. One can imagine what it meant to the world to bring these two spiritual and intellectual giants into personal contact during the period of 1860–1865, when Maxwell was professor at King’s College, London, and Faraday was at the Royal Institution, where he had been for nearly sixty years. It was significant that at the close of that period, that is, in January, 1865, Maxwell, in a letter to an intimate friend, said this:
“I have a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.”
A very strong claim made by the most modest of men! The paper was presented during that year to the Royal Society and was “great guns.” It marks, like Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation and his formulation of the laws of dynamics, a new epoch in science. In Maxwell I saw a Newton of the electrical science, but I confess that in those days nothing more substantial than my youthful enthusiasm justified me in that opinion. I was aware that my knowledge of Faraday’s discoveries and of Maxwell’s interpretation of them was quite hazy, and I made up my mind to get more light before I started out for Berlin.
The summer vacation was on and I decided to take Faraday’s “Electrical Researches” to Scotland, the land of Maxwell. In the preface to his great—and to me, at that time, enigmatic—electrical treatise Maxwell modestly had stated that he was an interpreter, only, of Faraday. But I was delighted when I heard Tyndall’s suggestion that Faraday would help me to interpret Maxwell. Perhaps, thought I, the invigorating air of Maxwell’s native Scotland would help me to catch some of the ideas which Maxwell had caught when he was reading Faraday. I selected what I thought would be a quiet and secluded spot, the island of Arran. It belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, and I was told that his grace had imposed so many restrictions upon his tenants that the island had become an ideal spot for those who sought seclusion. I found there a neat little inn at Corrie. It was surrounded by several tiny cottages for summer visitors who took their meals at the inn. It was popular with people from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley. Every one of the visiting families was blessed with numerous daughters. They were very athletic and played tennis from early morning till late in the afternoon, interrupted now and then by swimming contests in the frigid waters of the Firth of Clyde. In the evening there was lively dancing—not easy-going waltzing, but the real fling and reel of the strenuous Highland type. “What a sturdy race this is,” I said to myself, as I watched the dancers working themselves up into a frenzy of rhythmic movements, one hand resting upon the hip, the other raised high up in the air, while their joyful limbs were pumping up and down in perfect rhythm as if they were busy pulling up from mother earth all the earthly joys stored up there for mortal man. The whole scene was particularly thrilling to me when a piper came along and furnished the music. The bagpipes reminded me of my native Idvor, and made me feel at home in bonny Scotland before I had been much over a week in Arran. The Scotch and the Serbs have many things in common, and I always believed that somewhere back in the history of Iran they must have belonged to the same tribe. I am told that at the Macedonian front the Scotch and the Serbian soldiers got along beautifully, as if they had known each other from time immemorial, and they had little use for the other races assembled there. I got along at Corrie as if I had known the Scotch all my life. But that had its disadvantages also. I came to Corrie looking for seclusion where, undisturbed, I could communicate with Faraday. But the lively lassies from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley, the tennis and the swimming contests, the fascinating sound of the bagpipes accompanying the stirring Highland dances—all these things whispered into my ear: “Faraday can wait, but your friends here cannot.” Then I remembered a passage in one of Maxwell’s letters, given in Campbell’s life of Maxwell, which said: “Well, work is good and reading is good, but friends are better.” What a splendid excuse for joining the lassies and the lads at Corrie and revelling in the healthful pursuits of their youthful exuberance! Besides, said I to myself, have I not accomplished enough during my eighteen months’ drilling under Routh, Maxwell, La Grange, Rayleigh, Stokes, and Tyndall to deserve a complete change of mental and physical activity? When a person looks for an excuse to do what he or she likes to do a splendid excuse can always be found, and so I bade a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical Researches,” and joined the playful activities of my Corrie friends, challenging them to go the limit. In tennis and swimming I held my own, but the Highland reels floored me every time, until Madge, one of the sturdy lassies from Greenock, by persistent private instruction finally succeeded in initiating me into the mysteries of the Highland rhythm. Glen Sannox, near Corrie, with its rich bed of heather, watched me often by the hour making many futile efforts to catch this rhythm and make my limbs obey it. Nobody else watched these efforts in lonely Glen Sannox excepting Madge, and she, I told her, had more fun than a Bosnian gypsy training his bear. I can still hear the slopes of Glen Sannox echoing the clear notes of her ringing laughter, whenever I made an awkward and clumsy movement in my persistent efforts to master the Highland fling or reel. She could not help it, and I did not mind it, because I had made up my mind to do the trick or die. Finally I did it, not very well, but well enough for a fellow who was not a Scotchman, and Madge presented me with my portrait in pencil, which she drew during the intermissions between my efforts to master the art of the Highland dances. That was my reward and it was a very good one; she was a most promising young artist who had won several prizes in the Greenock art school. The memory of this experience always recalled to my mind the thoughts which went through my head at that time—the thoughts, namely, that Scotch originality, individuality, and sturdiness are hard to follow, not only when a foreigner meets these wonderful qualities in the mental activity of a Scot, like the mental activity of a Maxwell, but also in physical activity like that displayed in the national dances of Scotland. One does not appreciate fully the wonderful qualities of the Scot until he tries to master the theory and the practice of the Highland fling or reel. Maxwell’s electrical theory, I thought, might be just as different from other electrical theories as the Highland dances are different from the dances of other nations. I found out later that my guess was not very far from the truth.
Several years ago I was driving through the streets of London, visiting England again after an absence of many years. Suddenly I saw a crowd watching a Scotch dancer. The dancer was a young woman in Highland costume, and she was dancing the sword dance exquisitely; her husband was playing the bagpipes, marching up and down with all the swagger of the Scotch Highlander. I stopped my cab, got out, and watched. The memories of Corrie and Oban and of the gathering of the clans there which I witnessed while at Arran came back, and I was thrilled. Presently the dancer reached me in her tour soliciting voluntary contributions. I threw a sovereign into her plate and she looked surprised and asked me whether I had not made a mistake. “Yes,” said I, “I did make a mistake when I went out with only one sovereign in my pocket. If I had two you should have them both.” “Are you a Scotchman, sir?” she asked jokingly, and when I said “No” she smiled and said: “I did not think you were.” She knew that there was a fundamental difference between a Scot and a Serb.
After I had been at Corrie for about a month a letter arrived from my mother, written by my oldest sister, telling me how happy she was that I had decided to spend my summer in Scotland for the purpose of meditating over the life and the work of one of the greatest “saints of science.” I meant Faraday when I wrote to her. She also told me that Idvor was fearfully dusty on account of a long-continued drought, and that the crops were poor and the vintage prospects even poorer, and that Idvor was not a very cheerful place during that summer for anybody who wished to meditate free from complaints of grumbling neighbors. “Berlin, I am told, is much nearer to Idvor and when you are there you can always run down to Idvor, much more easily than you can now,” she said, closing her letter, in which logic and motherly love vied with each other to furnish her with a consolation for my absence from Idvor during that summer.
My mother’s letter made me feel guilty and it called for a reconsideration of my first resolution, adopted a month earlier, which authorized me to bid a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical Researches”; and I passed another resolution rescinding my first. But the question arose, how to carry it into effect. The answer was obvious: bid good-by to Corrie. My friends, however, suggested a less obvious but certainly a much more agreeable answer. “Go up and live in the Macmillan homestead, and read your Faraday there in the morning and come down to Corrie for dinner, late in the afternoon,” suggested Madge, and the suggestion was adopted without a dissenting voice on the part of my young friends.
The Macmillan homestead was a very humble old cottage located half-way between Corrie and the top of Goat Fell Mountain, the highest point on the island of Arran. An old crofter and his wife lived there, leading one of the most frugal existences that I had ever seen anywhere. They were willing to furnish me with lodging and simple breakfast, consisting of tea and oatmeal porridge with some bread covered with a thin layer of American lard. I did not object; I was prepared to take up low living and high thinking for the love of Michael Faraday. Communion with Faraday from early morning until four in the afternoon, and after that any play that came along, with plenty of dancing in the evening, was a splendid combination. Practically one solid meal a day, my dinner at the Corrie inn, supplied the fuel for all this activity, and it did it satisfactorily. How could I complain? The man whose wonderful scientific discoveries I was absorbing each day started life as a bookbinder’s apprentice, and the founder of the great Macmillan publishing-house was born and passed his boyhood days in the humble cottage where I was lodging. I was sure that in their youth they never had more than one solid meal a day and they prospered. My rapid absorption and digestion of the mental food which Faraday offered I attributed to my avoidance of superfluous physical food, but I must confess that I was quite hungry when dinner was served at the Corrie inn, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I never understood the full meaning of low living and high thinking as well as I did while I was a lodger at the Macmillan homestead. My thinking machinery, I thought, never worked better, and even my vision, always very good, seemed to be better than ever before. On exceptionally clear days I was sure that from the high elevation of the Macmillan cottage, on the slope of Goat Fell Mountain, I could see the beautiful Firth of Clyde as far as Greenock and Paisley, and at times even the gray and gloomy edifices of Glasgow seemed to loom up in the distance. I bragged about it, but my friends at Corrie met my bragging by informing me, jokingly, that any Scotchman can see much farther than that. One of them, a pupil of Sir William Thomson at the University of Glasgow, met my bragging by the epigrammatic question: “Can you see in Faraday as far as Maxwell, the Scotchman, saw?” I never bragged again about my vision while I was in Scotland. I was certain, however, that from the Macmillan homestead on the slopes of Goat Fell Mountain I obtained a deeper view into Faraday’s discoveries than I could have obtained in any other place. I seldom mention the names of Faraday and Maxwell without recalling to memory the beautiful island of Arran and the humble Macmillan homestead on Goat Fell Mountain.