"Wycombe, Haslemere. "I believe that the result of chemical inquiry would be greater and more important in nature if the suggestions made by your Committee could be efficiently carried out. I must confess, however, that my fears shape themselves very much after the fashion expressed by paragraph 5 of your Circular. "Original workers, I believe, always are under the hope that eventually time and opportunity will present themselves, so that they will allow them personally to work out their brightest and most promising ideas. If this be so, but few of such will find a place in the contemplated list. Again, hesitation might be felt amongst some lest the most promising subjects should be negatived by the results of an inexperienced hand. "The number of skilled hands in our laboratories is certainly larger than formerly, yet probably in this country latterly the harvest of original work has not been in due proportion to this number. "If so, the steps proposed towards the organization of chemical inquiry by way of a list will, I think, be beneficial. “G. B. BUCKTON." "Manchester, May 4, 1876. "We know that the scientific faculty is of slow growth in the case of any individual student. He becomes interested in a particular line of inquiry, and in pursuing it becomes further interested by the acquisition of new facts. The original inquiry will naturally ramify, and there will be a completeness about his work and also an accuracy which could not be expected from that done as it were to order. I think, too, that the mere suggestions of a research may tend to make it unpalatable to many minds. We know that mere suggestions have in some instances been claimed as discoveries. On this account many would feel some delicacy in even suggesting an inquiry, necessarily accompanied by the suggestion of the expected result, simply because it looks like a forestalling to some extent of the merit of the actual labourer. "Then, in order to be in a position to suggest, a scientific man must have mentally worked out the methods and anticipated the results of the proposed train of investigation, and would doubtless prefer to work it out himself, or, at any rate, to have the work done by his pupils under his immediate superintendence-first, because he naturally wishes that full justice should be done to the subject from his own point of view; and second, because he considers himself to a certain extent in the light of a proprietor. "I do not think it desirable to use any extra stimulus to induce students to work. If their own tastes and abilities and information do not lead them to find a vein of knowledge and work it, the application of such stimulus would probably result in the accumulation of incomplete and erroneous results to the hindrance of real scientific advancement. "JAMES P. JOULE." In order that the proposed scheme should be successful it ought to meet with very general support. This has been far from being the case, and therefore the Committee have not thought it advisable to proceed further in the matter. NOTICES AND ABSTRACTS OF MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SECTIONS. MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS. Address by Professor Sir WILLIAM THOMSON, LL.D., M.A., F.R.S., President of the Section. A CONVERSATION which I had with Professor Newcomb one evening last June, in Professor Henry's drawing-room in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, has forced me to give all my spare thoughts ever since to Hopkins's problem of Precession and Nutation, assuming the earth a rigid spheroidal shell filled with liquid. Six weeks ago, when I landed in England after a most interesting trip to America and back, and became painfully conscious that I must have the honour to address you here today, I wished to write an Address of which science in America should be the subject. I came home, indeed, vividly impressed with much that I had seen both in the Great Exhibition of Philadelphia and out of it, showing the truest scientific spirit and devotion, the originality, the inventiveness, the patient persevering thoroughness of work, the appreciativeness, and the generous open-mindedness and sympathy, from which the great things of science come. « Θέλω λέγειν ̓Ατρείδας I wish I could speak to you of the veteran Henry, generous rival of Faraday in electromagnetic discovery; of Peirce, the founder of high mathematics in America; of Bache, and of the splendid heritage he has left to America and to the world in the United-States Coast Survey; of the great school of astronomers which followed -Gould, Newton, Newcomb, Watson, Young, Alvan Clarke, Rutherford, Draper (father and son); of Commander Belknap and his great exploration of the Pacific depths by pianoforte-wire with imperfect apparatus supplied from Glasgow, out of which he forced a success in his own way; of Captain Sigsbee, who followed with like fervour and resolution, and made further improvements in the apparatus by which he has done marvels of easy, quick, and sure deep-sea sounding in his little surveying-ship 'Blake;' and of the admirable official spirit which makes such men and such doings possible in the United-States Naval Service. I would like to tell you, too, of my reasons for confidently expecting that American hydrography will soon supply the data from tidal observations, long ago asked of our Government in vain by a Committee of the British Association, by which the amount of the earth's elastic yielding to the distorting influence of sun and moon will be measured; and of my strong hope that the Compass Department of the American Navy will repay the debt to France, England, and Germany, so appreciatively acknowledged in their reprint of the works of Poisson, Airy, Archibald Smith, 1876. 1 Evans, and the Liverpool Compass Committee, by giving in return a fresh marine survey of terrestrial magnetism, to supply the navigator with data for correcting his compass without sights of sun or stars. Can I go on to Precession and Nutation without a word of what I saw in the Great Exhibition of Philadelphia ? In the U.S. Government part of it, Professor Hilgard showed me the measuring-rods of the U.S. Coast Survey, with their beautiful mechanical appliances for end measurement, by which the three great baselines of Maine, Long Island, and Georgia were measured with about the same accuracy as the most accurate scientific measurers, whether of Europe or America, have attained in comparing two metre or yard measures. In the United-States telegraphic department I saw and heard Elisha Gray's splendidly worked-out Electric Telephone actually sounding four messages simultaneously on the Morse code, and clearly capable of doing yet four times as many with very moderate improvements of detail; and I saw Edison's Automatic Telegraph delivering 1015 words in 57 seconds-this done by the long-neglected electro-chemical method of Bain, long ago condemned in England to the helot work of recording from a relay, and then turned adrift as needlessly delicate for that. In the Canadian Department I heard "To be or not to be......there's the rub," through an electric telegraph wire; but, scorning monosyllables, the electric articulation rose to higher flights, and gave me passages taken at random from the New-York newspapers:-"S.S. Cox has arrived" (I failed to make out the S.S. "Cox'); "the City of New York" "Senator Morton ""The Senate has resolved to print a thousand extra copies;" "The Americans in London have resolved to celebrate the coming fourth of July." All this my own ears heard, spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by the thin circular disk armature of just such another little electromagnet as this which I hold in my hand. The words were shouted with a clear and loud voice by my colleague-judge, Professor Watson, at the far end of the telegraph-wire, holding his mouth close to a stretched membrane, such as you see before you here, carrying a little piece of soft iron, which was thus made to perform in the neighbourhood of an electromagnet in circuit with the line motions proportional to the sonorific motions of the air. This, the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph, is due to a young countryman of our own, Mr. Graham Bell, of Edinburgh and Montreal and Boston, now becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. Who can but admire the hardihood of invention which devised such very slight means to realize the mathematical conception that, if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of quality which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuously and as nearly as may be in simple proportion to the velocity of a particle of air engaged in constituting the sound? The Patent Museum of Washington (an institution of which the nation is justly proud) and the beneficent working of the United-States patent laws deserve notice in the Section of the British Association concerned with branches of science to which nine tenths of all the useful patents of the world owe their foundations. I was much struck with the prevalence of patented inventions in the Exhibition: it seemed to me that every good thing deserving a patent was patented. I asked one inventor of a very good invention, " Why don't you patent it in England?' He answered, "The conditions in England are too onerous." We certainly are far behind America's wisdom in this respect. If Europe does not amend its patent laws (England in the opposite direction to that proposed in the Bills before the last two sessions of Parliament) America will speedily become the nursery of useful inventions for the world. I should tell you also of "Old Prob's" weather-warnings, which cost the nation 250,000 dollars a year: money well spent say the western farmers; and not they alone; in this the whole people of the United States are agreed; and though Democrats or Republicans playing the "economical ticket" may for half a session stop the appropriations for even the United-States Coast Survey, no one would for a moment think of proposing to starve "Old Prob;" and now that 80 per cent. of his probabilities have proved true, and General Myers has for a month back ceased to call his daily forecasts "probabilities" and has begun to call them indications, what will the western farmers call him this time next year? And the United-States Naval Observatory, full of the very highest science, under the command of Admiral Davis! If, to get on to Precession and Nutation, I had resolved to omit telling you that I had there, in an instrument for measuring photographs of the Transit of Venus shown me by Professor Harkness (a young Scotsman attracted into the United-States Naval Service), seen, for the first time in an astronomical observatory, a geometrical slide, the verdict on the disaster on board the Thunderer,' published while I am writing this address, forbids me to keep any such resolution, and compels me to put the question-Is there in the British Navy, or in a British steamer, or in a British land-boiler another safety-valve so constructed that by any possibility, at any temperature or under any stress, it can jam? and to say that if there is, it must be instantly corrected or removed. I ought to speak to you, too, of the already venerable Harvard University, the Cambridge of America, and of the Technological Institute of Boston, created by William Rogers, brother of my late colleague in this University (Glasgow), Henry Rogers, and of the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, which with its youthful vigour has torn Sylvester from us, has utilized the genius and working-power of Roland for experimental research, and three days after my arrival in America sent for the young Porter Poinier to make him a Fellow; but he was on his deathbed, in New York, "begging his physicians to keep him alive just to finish his book, and then he would be willing to go." Of his book, Thermodynamics,' we may hope to see at least a part, for much of the manuscript and good and able friends to edit it are left; but the appointment to a Fellowship in the Johns Hopkins University came a day too late to gratify his noble ambition. But the stimulus of intercourse with American scientific men left no place in my mind for framing or attempting to frame a report on American science. Disturbed by Newcomb's suspicions of the earth's irregularities as a time-keeper, I could think of nothing but precession and nutation, and tides and monsoons, and settlements of the equatorial regions, and meltings of the polar ice. Week after week passed before I could put down two words which I could read to you here today; and so I have nothing to offer you for my Address but Review of Evidence regarding the Physical Condition of the Earth: its internal Temperature; the Fluidity or Solidity of its interior Substance; the Rigidity, Elasticity, Plasticity, of its External Figure; and the Permanence or Variability of its Period and Axis of Rotation. The evidence of a high internal temperature is too well known to need any quotation of particulars at present. Suffice it to say that below the uppermost ten metres stratum of rock or soil sensibly affected by diurnal and annual variations of temperature there is generally found a gradual increase of temperature downwards, approximating roughly in ordinary localities to an average rate of 1° Centigrade per thirty metres of descent, but much greater in the neighbourhood of active volcanoes and certain other special localities, of comparatively small area, where hot springs and perhaps also sulphurous vapours prove an intimate relationship to volcanic quality. It is worthy of remark in passing that, so far as we know at present, there are no localities of exceptionally small rate of augmentation of underground temperature, and none where temperature diminishes at any time through any considerable depth downwards below the stratum sensibly influenced by summer heat and winter cold. Any considerable area of the earth of, say, not less than a kilometre in any horizontal diameter, which for several thousand years had been covered by snow or ice, and from which the ice had melted away and left an average surface temperature of 13° Cent., would, during 900 years, show a decreasing temperature for some depth down from the surface; and 3600 years after the clearing away of the ice would still show residual effect of the ancient cold, in a half rate of augmentation of temperature downwards in the upper strata, gradually increasing to the whole normal rate, which would be sensibly reached at a depth of 600 metres. By a simple effort of geological calculus it has been estimated that 1° per 30 metres gives 1000° per 30,000 metres, and 3333° per 100 kilometres. This arithmetical result is irrefragable; but what of the physical conclusion drawn from it Evans, and the Liverpool Compass Committee, by giving in return a fresh marine survey of terrestrial magnetism, to supply the navigator with data for correcting his compass without sights of sun or stars. Can I go on to Precession and Nutation without a word of what I saw in the Great Exhibition of Philadelphia? In the U.S. Government part of it, Professor Hilgard showed me the measuring-rods of the U.S. Coast Survey, with their beautiful mechanical appliances for end measurement, by which the three great baselines of Maine, Long Island, and Georgia were measured with about the same accuracy as the most accurate scientific measurers, whether of Europe or America, have attained in comparing two metre or yard measures. In the United-States telegraphic department I saw and heard Elisha Gray's splendidly worked-out Electric Telephone actually sounding four messages simultaneously on the Morse code, and clearly capable of doing yet four times as many with very moderate improvements of detail; and I saw Edison's Automatic Telegraph delivering 1015 words in 57 seconds this done by the long-neglected electro-chemical method of Bain, long ago condemned in England to the helot work of recording from a relay, and then turned adrift as needlessly delicate for that. In the Canadian Department I heard "To be or not to be......there's the rub," through an electric telegraph wire; but, scorning monosyllables, the electric articulation rose to higher flights, and gave me passages taken at random from the New-York newspapers:-"S.S. Cox has arrived" (I failed to make out the S.S. "Cox'); "the City of New York" "Senator Morton ;""The Senate has resolved to print a thousand extra copies;' "The Americans in London have resolved to celebrate the coming fourth of July." All this my own ears heard, spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by the thin circular disk armature of just such another little electromagnet as this which I hold in my hand. The words were shouted with a clear and loud voice by my colleague-judge, Professor Watson, at the far end of the telegraph-wire, holding his mouth close to a stretched membrane, such as you see before you here, carrying a little piece of soft iron, which was thus made to perform in the neighbourhood of an electromagnet in circuit with the line motions proportional to the sonorific motions of the air. This, the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph, is due to a young countryman of our own, Mr. Graham Bell, of Edinburgh and Montreal and Boston, now becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. Who can but admire the hardihood of invention which devised such very slight means to realize the mathematical conception that, if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of quality which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuously and as nearly as may be in simple proportion to the velocity of a particle of air engaged in constituting the sound? The Patent Museum of Washington (an institution of which the nation is justly proud) and the beneficent working of the United-States patent laws deserve notice in the Section of the British Association concerned with branches of science to which nine tenths of all the useful patents of the world owe their foundations. I was much struck with the prevalence of patented inventions in the Exhibition: it seemed to me that every good thing deserving a patent was patented. I asked one inventor of a very good invention, "Why don't you patent it in England?" He answered, "The conditions in England are too onerous." We certainly are far behind America's wisdom in this respect. If Europe does not amend its patent laws (England in the opposite direction to that proposed in the Bills before the last two sessions of Parliament) America will speedily become the nursery of useful inventions for the world. I should tell you also of "Old Prob's" weather-warnings, which cost the nation 250,000 dollars a year: money well spent say the western farmers; and not they alone; in this the whole people of the United States are agreed; and though Democrats or Republicans playing the "economical ticket" may for half a session stop the appropriations for even the United-States Coast Survey, no one would for a moment think of proposing to starve "Old Prob;" and now that 80 per cent. of his probabilities have proved true, and General Myers has for a month back ceased to call his daily forecasts "probabilities" and has begun to call them indications, what will the western farmers call him this time next year? |