Chapter II: Introduction

IT may be well to explain to American readers for whom this special edition is published that the Juvenile Lectures of the Royal Institution were first instituted in 1825. At a general meeting of the members in December of that year, the Managers reported “that Mr. Millington had engaged to deliver a set of Lectures on Natural Philosophy, suited to a Juvenile Auditory, during the Christmas recess, to be continued and concluded in those of Easter and Whitsuntide.” For some reason the actual delivery of the course was commenced on Christmas, 1826, by J. Wallis on “Astronomy.”

In February, 1826, the Managers reported that “they had consulted with Mr. Faraday on the subject of engaging him to take part in the Juvenile Lectures proposed to be given during the Christmas and Easter recesses. The Managers found it would be exceedingly inconvenient to withdraw Mr. Faraday from his experimental investigations to conduct such lectures.” Faraday, however, found time in subsequent years to give no less than nineteen courses of Christmas Lectures. He was extremely interested in the importance of Science Lectures to young people, and his Juvenile Lectures were masterpieces of exposition.

Tyndall gave a number of these courses, and others were given by Dewar, Ball, Fleming, S. P. Thompson, Lodge, Boys, and other well-known lecturers.

It has become a tradition in the Royal Institution that the lectures shall be fully illustrated by experiments, and it has generally been the case that both lectures and experiments have been to some degree novel, in both the matter and the manner of their exposition. The audience consists not only of the juveniles for whom the lectures are primarily intended, but also of seniors who are interested in the attempts to explain new points or show novel illustrations.

I have written this in the hope that those in America who do me the honor of reading this book will sympathize in the problem of exposition which I have tried to solve. The English edition contains a preface which will be found reproduced in the following pages, and will help further to explain the immediate purpose of the lectures.

W. B.

London, January, 1925.