thought of my mother’s words which described the steep and slippery
climb which awaited me, and which was leading, as she had expressed it,
to real stars from heaven. I felt the steepness of the climb, but I
saw no star ahead of me. Routh was a great master of the mathematical
technique, but he was not a creative genius; he was a virtuoso but
not a composer. His principal concern was to drill his students in
the art of solving those conventional problems which usually formed
part of tripos examinations. The poetical element of dynamics, which
thrills, was absent from his businesslike drills. The only star, I
thought, which his students saw ahead of them was a high place in the
tripos examinations, and that star did not attract me; recalling my
mother’s story, I called it a tin star. I loved Routh and admired him
much, but I did not admire the Cambridge tripos method of laying a
foundation for mathematical physics. When Niven discovered my state of
mind he sympathized, and he gave me a little book called “Matter and
Motion” by Maxwell, a very small book written by a very great author.
“You are not up to the mathematics of Maxwell’s great electrical
treatise,” said Niven, as he handed me the little book, “but you will
find no difficulties of that kind in this little book, which covers
a very great subject.” It was first published in America in the _Van
Nostrand Magazine_. No magazine ever performed a greater educational
service. There was not only much poetical beauty and philosophical
depth in this tiny and apparently most elementary book on dynamics,
but there were also many illustrations of the close connection between
this fundamental science and other departments of physical science.
Maxwell’s presentation roused, and it also stimulated, the spirit of
inquiry. Routh’s elaborate system of clever tripos problems in dynamics
appeared to me for the first time as little parts, only, of a complex
and endless art which had grown out of a simple and beautiful science,
the science of dynamics, which first saw the light of day at Trinity
College, Cambridge. The exquisite art as practised by Routh and the
subtle science as described by Maxwell, the two leading Cambridge
wranglers of 1854, disclosed to me the real meaning of Newton, the
greatest among the great Cambridge men, the creator of the science
of dynamics. I knew then that I had seen one of the real stars of
heaven of which my mother spoke. But without the light of Maxwell
I would not have seen the light of Newton. It will be seen further
below that Maxwell and Routh, Cambridge wranglers of 1854, were the
representatives of different mental attitudes in Cambridge: Maxwell was
the apostle of the new and Routh of the old spirit of Cambridge. Niven
was very fond of reminding me of my first visit when I had told him
that Cambridge without Maxwell had no attraction for me. After reading
Maxwell’s little classic I told Niven that my opinion was, after all,
not so funny and strange as he represented it.
* * * * *
A short digression is timely now. I went to Trinity College
occasionally to spend a Sunday evening with Mr. Niven. One Sunday
evening I walked around the historical Trinity quadrangle, waiting
until Mr. Niven returned to his rooms from the evening service in the
college chapel. The mysterious-looking light streaming through the
stained-glass windows of the chapel and the heavenly music radiating
from the invisible choir and organ commanded my attention. I stood
motionless like a solitary spectre in the middle of the deserted
and sombre quadrangle, and gazed, and listened, and dreamed. Yes, I
dreamed of great Newton, the greatest of all Trinity dons; and I saw
how, two centuries before, he was treading over the same spot where I
was standing whenever he was returning from a Sunday evening service
in the very chapel at which I was gazing. I dreamed also of Maxwell,
another great Trinity don; and remembered that, five years before, the
very same choir and organ to which I was listening had paid their last
tribute to this great Cambridge man, when his earthly remains left the
grief-stricken university on their last pilgrimage to Maxwell’s native
Scotland. But I knew that his spirit had remained at Cambridge to
inspire forever the coming generations of ambitious students.
I dreamed of other great Trinity College men whose spirits seemed to
hover about the sombre quadrangle, rejoicing in the heavenly light
and sound which radiated from the historical chapel where Newton and
Maxwell worshipped in days gone by. I longed for the day when my alma
mater, Columbia College, and other colleges in America, could offer
such an inspiring scene to its students; and I wondered how soon that
day would come. Niven told me the following story which, he thought,
might answer this question:
A don of Magdalen College, Oxford, was asked by an American friend how
long it would take to raise, in America, a lawn like the famous lawn of
Magdalen College. “I do not know,” said the don, “but it took us over
two centuries to do it here in Oxford.” Niven implied, of course, that
it will take much more than two centuries to create at any American
college that atmosphere which surrounded me at the Trinity College
quadrangle on that memorable Sunday evening. It was the mysterious
charm of that atmosphere which held me chained to Cambridge in spite
of the fact that I did not believe that the Cambridge tripos method of
laying a foundation in mathematical physics was fitting my particular
case.
Students shift from university to university in continental Europe,
migrating to places where they are attracted by the reputations of
teachers who happen to be there. I went to Cambridge because I thought
that Maxwell was there. But at Cambridge, and at Oxford too, it was
not only the teacher who was there but also the teachers who had lived
there during generations long past who determined the choice made by
ambitious students. The great teachers in the mathematical sciences
when I was there were Lord Rayleigh, the successor of Maxwell; John
Crouch Adams, who, with Leverrier in France, shared in the great
distinction of calculating from the perturbations in the orbit of
Uranus the position of the still unknown planet Neptune; George Gabriel
Stokes, the greatest mathematical physicist in Europe at that time, and
the occupant of the professorial chair once held by great Newton. But
that which brought the students in mathematical sciences to Cambridge
was not only the lustre of the reputations of these great professors,
but also the existence at Cambridge of a historical educational policy,
to the development of which many great Cambridge mathematicians of
generations long past had made lasting contributions. The mathematical
tripos was the most concrete expression of this traditional policy.
It can be inferred from what I have already said that this traditional
policy did not suit me. I do not think that it would have suited any
American student of those days who had a taste for physics. I said
once to a Cambridge friend that my landlady, Routh, and rowing shaped
the daily events of my life. He saw my point and admitted that each
one of them represented a powerful determining factor in the life of
a Cambridge student who was preparing for the mathematical tripos
examinations. Each one of them had its deep roots in ancient traditions
from which it was difficult to deviate. Routh was a rare product and
a loyal apostle of the tradition called the Mathematical Tripos. It
was perhaps the most powerful of all Cambridge traditions and stood
as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar; its great strength was the
fact that it had produced many distinguished men of science. But
nevertheless some of the greatest living Cambridge physicists of those
days felt that it had defects and called for remedies. It was claimed
that its method, having no direct connection with the nascent problems
of scientific research, was artificial and unproductive.
Sir William Thomson, known later as Lord Kelvin, was among the first
who called for speedy remedies. He was the second wrangler in 1845 and
Stephen Parkinson was the senior wrangler. Thomson left Cambridge and
went to Paris to get from the famous physicist Regnault what he could
not get at Cambridge. After a year, when only twenty-two years old,
he accepted a professorship in physics and directorship in physical
research at the University of Glasgow. The long-headed Scotch were
fully thirty years ahead of Cambridge in establishing a research
laboratory in physics. Here Thomson worked out the scientific elements
of the first Atlantic cable, and invented the instruments necessary
for its operation. When I was in Cambridge the name of Thomson was
attached to most measuring instruments employed in the electrical
industries at that time, and he was also one of the leaders of abstract
scientific thought. He represented in the popular mind the new spirit
of Cambridge. Stephen Parkinson, Thomson’s superior in the tripos test
of 1845, was still in Cambridge when I was there, and had to his credit
a text-book on geometrical optics, with stereotyped problems, suitable
for tripos examinations. He was not among those who called for a change
in the traditional mathematical tripos examinations at Cambridge.
Maxwell, undoubtedly inspired by Thomson, was one of the earliest
leaders of the Cambridge movement which demanded a modification of the
mathematical tripos, favoring more the spirit of research and less the
art of solving cleverly formulated mathematical problems. The Cavendish
Physics Laboratory, organized by Maxwell and first opened in 1874, was,
according to Niven, a concrete expression of this movement.
A similar movement was taking place in the United States in those days.
Among its leaders were President Barnard of Columbia College, and
Joseph Henry, the first and the most distinguished secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution. The date of the foundation of Johns Hopkins
University falls within the early period of this movement. Niven told
me that what Maxwell had been doing in the Cavendish Laboratory at
Cambridge was being done also by Maxwell’s friend, Professor Rowland,
at Johns Hopkins, founded in Baltimore in 1876. Maxwell thought very
highly of his young American friend, and undoubtedly recommended him
strongly for the physics professorship at Johns Hopkins. Just as
the establishment of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory in Cambridge
marks the beginning of a great epoch in the development of physics in
Cambridge and in Great Britain, so the organization of the physics
laboratory at Johns Hopkins by Rowland marks a new and most fruitful
era of scientific research in the United States. Rowland’s influence
had not yet been felt at Columbia College when I was a student there,
nor at many other American colleges of those days. But the forward
movement soon commenced; and the people of this country do not
understand yet as fully as they should how much they owe to the late
Henry Augustus Rowland, whom I had the honor of knowing personally and
whose friendship I enjoyed for several years. One of the aims of this
simple narrative is to throw more light upon some obscure spots of this
kind which need more illumination, and particularly upon the work of
men like “Rowland of Troy, the doughty knight,” as Maxwell referred to
him in his verses.
Another historical fact must be mentioned here which is very
characteristic of the state of the science of physics in those days,
and which is closely connected with the progress of this science as it
appeared to me in the course of the last forty years. I mention now
another great American physicist whose name, like that of Rowland, I
first heard mentioned at Cambridge at that time, and that was Professor
Josiah Willard Gibbs, of Yale. I know that many of my young colleagues
will find it strange that I never had heard of Lord Rayleigh, of
England, before I graduated at Columbia. What will they say when they
hear that at that time I never had heard of famous Willard Gibbs, of
Yale, New Haven, U. S. A.? Will they charge me with extraordinary
ignorance, for which Columbia of those days was to blame? That would be
unjust, as the following story will prove. One evening, after dinner,
I was enjoying at the University Club, New York, the company of some
twelve Yale graduates, and one of them was the learned Professor
William Welch, dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was then
president of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of my Yale friends
present were of about my age or even older. I offered to wager that
the majority of them would fail to give the name of the scientist who,
in Doctor Welch’s opinion and in mine, was the greatest scientist that
Yale had ever graduated. Not one of them mentioned Willard Gibbs. When
I mentioned his name they frankly confessed that they had never heard
of him before. Neither they nor Yale College of those days were to
blame. Did my fellow students at Cambridge, who were training for the
mathematical tripos, ever hear of him before they came to Cambridge?
If they did, it was by accident, just as I heard of him by accident.
Such was the spirit of the times in those days; and it was against this
spirit that President Barnard of Columbia took up arms. He considered
its existence a national calamity. But I shall return to this point
later.
I will now describe the accident just mentioned, because it is closely
connected with the main thread of my narrative. In the beginning of the
Easter term, the third term of my training under Routh, I had caught up
with my class and had spare time for outside reading. Niven was greatly
impressed by my enthusiastic eulogies of Maxwell’s little book, “Matter
and Motion,” and he suggested that I take up the reading of another
of Maxwell’s little classics, “Theory of Heat.” It was written with
the same elegant simplicity as his “Matter and Motion.” This little
text-book on heat was the first to give me a living physical picture
of the mode of operation by which heat is transformed into mechanical
work, an operation which I had watched so often in the Cortlandt
Street boiler-room. I had watched it, but I had never dreamed that the
operation could be described as Maxwell described it. According to
him it may be considered as the resultant action of non-coordinated
activities of an immense number of busy little molecules, each of
which, as far as human observers can tell, moves about lustily
according to its own sweet will. But behold the miracle: the average
activity of the countless crowd obeys with mathematical accuracy the
fundamental law for heat transformations, the so-called second law of
thermodynamics discovered by Sadi Carnot, the great French engineer. It
was Maxwell’s little classic which also informed me that in all cases
of very large numbers of individuals, whether they be active molecules
or busy human beings, exhibiting as far as an observer can tell
non-coordinated activities, we must apply the so-called statistical
method of inquiry, that is, the method which statisticians employ in
recording the activity of a nation. Newton’s dynamics, which at that
time had been the food of Cambridge for two centuries, said nothing
about that. It was a new idea in the heads of new men, who, under the
leadership of Maxwell, were creating a new and far-reaching science.
Up to that time Tyndall’s poetical description of “Heat as a Mode
of Motion” was my gospel regarding thermal phenomena, but Maxwell’s
plain and modest text-book, intended to stimulate the imagination of
the inquisitive mind of the young student, was the first to assist me
in forming my own judgment on the doctrines described by Tyndall and
illustrated by beautiful experiments. Routh’s training-table of tripos
athletes offered no such morsels of stimulating food, because these
athletes were training for tripos examinations and not for research in
physics. I will say now that it was in Maxwell’s theory of heat that
I first saw the name of Willard Gibbs, and I heard from Niven that
Maxwell held Gibbs in very high esteem. I must say also that Gibbs was
the first in this country to write a splendid treatise on statistical
mechanics.
* * * * *
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!