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CORRIGENDUM

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LORD KELVIN

CHAPTER I

PARENTAGE AND EARLY EDUCATION

Lord Kelvin came of a stock which has helped to give to the north of Ireland its commercial and industrial supremacy over the rest of that distressful country. His ancestors were county Down agriculturists of Scottish extraction. His father was James Thomson, the well-known Glasgow Professor of Mathematics, and author of mathematical text-books which at one time were much valued, and are even now worth consulting. James Thomson was born on November 13, 1786, near Ballynahinch, county Down. Being the son of a small farmer he was probably unable to enter on university studies at the usual age, for he did not matriculate in Scotland until 1810. The class-lists of the time show that he distinguished himself highly in mathematics, natural philosophy, and classics.

An interesting incident of these student days of his father was related by Lord Kelvin in his installation address as Chancellor of the University in 1904, and is noteworthy as indicating how comparatively recent are many of the characteristics of our present-day life and commerce. James Thomson and some companions, walking from Greenock to Glasgow, on their way to join the college classes at the commencement of the session, "saw a prodigy—a black chimney moving rapidly beyond a field on the left-hand side of their road. They jumped the fence, ran across the field, and saw, to their astonishment, Henry Bell's 'Comet' (then not a year old) travelling on the Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock."1 Sometimes then the passage from Belfast to Greenock took a long time. Once James Thomson, crossing in an old lime-carrying smack, was three or four days on the way, in the course of which the vessel, becalmed, was carried three times by the tide round Ailsa Craig.

Mr. Thomson was elected in 1815 to the Professorship of Mathematics in the Royal Academical Institution of Belfast, and held the post for seventeen years, building up for himself an excellent reputation as a teacher, and as a clear and accurate writer. Just then analytical methods were beginning to supersede the processes of geometrical demonstration which the form adopted by Newton for the Principia had tended to perpetuate in this country. Laplace was at the height of his fame in France, and was writing the great analytical Principia, his Mécanique Céleste, applying the whole force of his genius, and all the resources of the differential and integral calculus invented by Newton and improved by the mathematicians of the intervening century, to the elucidation and extension of the "system of the world," which had been so boldly sketched by the founder of modern physical science.

In that period Fourier wrote his memoirs on the conduction of heat, and gave to the world his immortal book to be an inspiration to the physical philosophers of succeeding generations. Legendre had written memoirs which were to lead, in the hands of Jacobi and his successors, to a new province of mathematics, while, in Germany, Gauss had begun his stately march of discovery.

The methods and results of this period of mathematical activity were at first hardly known in this country: the slavish devotion of Cambridge to the geometrical processes and the fluxional notation of Newton, an exclusive partiality which Newton himself would have been the first to condemn, led analytical methods, equally Newtonian, to be stigmatised as innovations, because clothed in the unfamiliar garb of the continental notation. A revolt against this was led by Sir John Herschel, Woodhouse, Peacock, and some others at Cambridge, who wrote books which had a great effect in bringing about a change of methods. Sir John thus described the effect of the new movements:—"Students at our universities, fettered by no prejudices, entangled by no habits, and excited by the ardour and emulation of youth, had heard of the existence of masses of knowledge from which they were debarred by the mere accident of position. They required no more. The prestige which magnifies what is unknown, and the attractions inherent in what is forbidden, coincided in their impulse. The books were procured and read, and produced their natural effects. The brows of many a Cambridge examiner were elevated, half in ire, half in admiration, at the unusual answers which began to appear in examination papers. Even moderators are not made of impenetrable stuff, though fenced with sevenfold Jacquier, and tough bull-hide of Vince and Wood."

The memoirs and treatises of the continental analysts were eagerly procured and studied by James Thomson, and as he was bound by no examination traditions, he freely adopted their methods, so far as these came within the scope of his teaching, and made them known to the English reading public in his text-books. Hence when the chair of Mathematics at Glasgow became vacant in 1832 by the death of Mr. James Millar, Mr. Thomson was at once chosen by the Faculty, which at that time was the electing body.

The Faculty consisted of the Principal and the Professors of Divinity, Church History, Oriental Languages, Natural Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, Greek, Humanity, Civil Law, Practice of Medicine, Anatomy, and Practical Astronomy. It administered the whole revenues and property of the College, and possessed the patronage of the above-named chairs with the exception of Church History, Civil Law, Medicine, Anatomy, and Astronomy, so that Mr. Thomson became not only Professor of Mathematics, but also, in virtue of his office, a member of what was really the