Chapter XII: The National Research Council 349 (8)

When the Easter term approached its end in May I began to think of my summer vacation. I needed one. Seven months of steady drilling under Routh, supplemented by extra reading prescribed by him, and also by the reading of Maxwell’s inspiring books, had produced results with which I was satisfied, and so was Mr. Niven, my Trinity College mentor. I certainly did not feel any more like a goose wandering in a fog; I saw much light ahead, and felt much more confident that I saw the goal for which I was steering. But my pitch was very high and I needed de-tuning. I finally decided to visit some little place in France and selected Pornic, on the French Atlantic coast, in the department called Loire Inférieure. I knew nothing about it except what I had read in Baedeker, but it looked to me like a quiet little place where in addition to complete change of scene I should have a good chance to learn French. The names of Laplace, La Grange, and Ampère were mentioned so often and with so much veneration by Maxwell, that I felt ashamed of my ignorance of the language of France. Pornic was only a day’s journey from Cambridge, and off I went with no other books in my bag beside Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell” and a French grammar.

The Pornic landlady was not up to the standard of my Cambridge landlady, but I did not complain nor make any invidious comparisons; the English were not very popular in those days on the Atlantic coast of France, where the oldest fishermen had not yet forgotten the operations of the English fleet during the Napoleonic wars. I was the only stranger in town, and when it became known that I was an American who had come to Pornic to study the language of France the village was mine. I engaged the village schoolmaster to give me French conversation lessons. I met him in his garden every evening and we talked to our hearts’ content. He was a most entertaining little fellow, with a bald head, a red nose, and a big snuff-box to which he appealed very frequently for a fresh supply of interesting topics of conversation. He boasted among the villagers that his reputation as a French scholar had reached the United States and, _voilà_, had brought me to Pornic. I never denied it, but on the contrary I often walked through the village streets with the good old _maître d’école_ and listened most attentively to his French accents as if they were the rarest pearls of wisdom.

When the villagers found out that I was not only an American but also a student of a great English university, then the stock of the little schoolmaster rose sky-high. My landlady informed me that the old curé had become quite jealous of the little man’s rapid rise in the community. An old but renovated Norman castle was a part of Pornic; it stood on the very edge of the steep coast and it was inhabited in summer by a rich merchant of Nantes. The castle had a thick grove of stately old trees, and there the nightingales revelled. On moonlight nights I spent many watchful hours listening to their mellow notes, accompanied by the solemn rhythm of the Atlantic waves striking gently upon the cliffs of the rocky coast, which appeared in my imagination, as I listened, like towering pipes of a giant organ. In daytime I selected lonely spots on the coast and there I spent my days from early morning till late in the afternoon memorizing my French grammar and vocabulary. Every evening I practised for an hour or so in conversation with my beloved _maître d’école_. This advanced my knowledge of French very rapidly and before one month was over I could converse tolerably well. My circle of acquaintances expanded rapidly as my knowledge of French increased, until it took in the nightingale grove, including the family of the merchant from Nantes. Between my friends in the nightingale grove and my schoolmaster’s garden my conversation in French became so fluent that it astonished the natives. They pronounced it perfect. But discounting this enthusiastic estimate by even fifty per cent I was still secure in my belief that I was enriched by a good knowledge of the language of a great civilization. A two months’ visit to Pornic had been my plan; its end was very near, and my trip was a success. I bade good-by to my friends in little Pornic and arrived in Paris on the following day, the fourteenth of July, 1884.

Paris was gay, celebrating the national holiday of France, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. This gave me a chance to see many of the striking characteristics of the gay side of Paris in a single day. The next day, while visiting the great Sorbonne and the Collège de France in the Quartier Latin, I found a great treasure in a second-hand bookshop: La Grange’s great treatise, “Méchanique Analytique,” first published under the auspices of the French Academy in 1788. La Grange, the Newton of France! There was no student of dynamics who had not heard of his name and of his great treatise. My two months’ stay in Pornic had enabled me to appreciate fully the beauty of the language of this great work, and my training with Routh had eliminated many difficulties of the mathematical technique. I was convinced of that in my very first attempts in Paris at deciphering some of its inspiring pages. I describe this short stay in France at some length, because I wish to refer to it later for the purpose of showing how little things can exert a big influence in the shaping of human life.

* * * * *

I had promised my mother to visit her again during that summer, and off I went, deserting without delay the gay scenes of Paris. On my journey to Idvor I wasted no time looking to the right or to the left of my speeding train; villages and towns, rivers and mountains, and the busy folks in the yellow fields who were gathering in the blessings of the harvest season appeared like so many passing pictures which did not interest me. La Grange was talking to me, and I had neither eyes nor ears for anybody or for anything else. Oh, how happy I was when I saw Idvor in the distance, where I knew I should be free for nearly two months during that summer to read and to reflect, free from all restraints of the Cambridge routine. By the end of that heavenly vacation I had mastered a good part of La Grange’s classical treatise, and in addition I had reread carefully Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell,” and I understood many things which I had seen in Cambridge but had not understood before. The Cambridge movement described above was clearly revealed to me in the course of that summer, by a careful study of Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell.”

Idvor was never rich in books nor in people who paid much attention to books. To think that a native of Idvor would ever read a La Grange in his humble peasant home seemed incredible. The natives of Idvor noticed that, during my second visit, I was much less communicative than during the first, on account of my devotion to what they considered some strange books, which to those who saw them suggested sacred books. The company of La Grange and of Maxwell kept me a prisoner in my mother’s garden. I told my mother that Maxwell and La Grange were two great saints in the world of science, and she regarded my reading during that summer as a study of the lives of saints. That made her happy, but it puzzled the good people of Idvor. Studies of this kind they associated with priests and bishops; and, noticing that I paid much less attention to bagpipes and kolo dancers and to other worldly things, they began to whisper about that Misha was getting ready to enter monastic life. What a pity, they said, to gather so much knowledge in great America and then bury it in a monastery!

My mother paid no attention to these idle whisperings. She knew better. When I described to her the ancient college buildings and the beautiful chapels of Cambridge, and the religious life of the students and of the dons, she listened spellbound. When I related to her the many traditions of the old university, and informed her that one learned there, not only from the teachers living there at that time, but also from great teachers who had long departed, a luminous expression in her eyes told me that she was about to reveal to me an original thought. “I go to church, my son,” she said, “not so much because I expect the priest to reveal to me some new divine truth, but because I wish to look at the icons of saints. That reminds me of their saintly work, and through the contemplation of their work I communicate with God. 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_.”

With this thought in her mind my mother was most happy when I bade her good-by and, repeating her own words, told her that I must go back to “Cambridge, the great temple which is consecrated to the _eternal truth_.” “Go back, my son,” she said, “and 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.”

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_.

From a photograph taken about 1885]

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.