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_.
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL (1820-1893)
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.
The summer vacation was on and I decided to take Faraday’s “Electrical
Researches” to Scotland, the land of Maxwell. In the preface to his
great--and to me, at that time, enigmatic--electrical treatise Maxwell
modestly had stated that he was an interpreter, only, of Faraday. But
I was delighted when I heard Tyndall’s suggestion that Faraday would
help me to interpret Maxwell. Perhaps, thought I, the invigorating air
of Maxwell’s native Scotland would help me to catch some of the ideas
which Maxwell had caught when he was reading Faraday. I selected what
I thought would be a quiet and secluded spot, the island of Arran.
It belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, and I was told that his grace
had imposed so many restrictions upon his tenants that the island
had become an ideal spot for those who sought seclusion. I found
there a neat little inn at Corrie. It was surrounded by several tiny
cottages for summer visitors who took their meals at the inn. It was
popular with people from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley. Every one
of the visiting families was blessed with numerous daughters. They
were very athletic and played tennis from early morning till late in
the afternoon, interrupted now and then by swimming contests in the
frigid waters of the Firth of Clyde. In the evening there was lively
dancing--not easy-going waltzing, but the real fling and reel of the
strenuous Highland type. “What a sturdy race this is,” I said to
myself, as I watched the dancers working themselves up into a frenzy
of rhythmic movements, one hand resting upon the hip, the other raised
high up in the air, while their joyful limbs were pumping up and down
in perfect rhythm as if they were busy pulling up from mother earth all
the earthly joys stored up there for mortal man. The whole scene was
particularly thrilling to me when a piper came along and furnished the
music. The bagpipes reminded me of my native Idvor, and made me feel at
home in bonny Scotland before I had been much over a week in Arran. The
Scotch and the Serbs have many things in common, and I always believed
that somewhere back in the history of Iran they must have belonged to
the same tribe. I am told that at the Macedonian front the Scotch and
the Serbian soldiers got along beautifully, as if they had known each
other from time immemorial, and they had little use for the other races
assembled there. I got along at Corrie as if I had known the Scotch all
my life. But that had its disadvantages also. I came to Corrie looking
for seclusion where, undisturbed, I could communicate with Faraday.
But the lively lassies from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley, the tennis
and the swimming contests, the fascinating sound of the bagpipes
accompanying the stirring Highland dances--all these things whispered
into my ear: “Faraday can wait, but your friends here cannot.” Then I
remembered a passage in one of Maxwell’s letters, given in Campbell’s
life of Maxwell, which said: “Well, work is good and reading is good,
but friends are better.” What a splendid excuse for joining the lassies
and the lads at Corrie and revelling in the healthful pursuits of their
youthful exuberance! Besides, said I to myself, have I not accomplished
enough during my eighteen months’ drilling under Routh, Maxwell, La
Grange, Rayleigh, Stokes, and Tyndall to deserve a complete change of
mental and physical activity? When a person looks for an excuse to do
what he or she likes to do a splendid excuse can always be found, and
so I bade a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical Researches,”
and joined the playful activities of my Corrie friends, challenging
them to go the limit. In tennis and swimming I held my own, but the
Highland reels floored me every time, until Madge, one of the sturdy
lassies from Greenock, by persistent private instruction finally
succeeded in initiating me into the mysteries of the Highland rhythm.
Glen Sannox, near Corrie, with its rich bed of heather, watched me
often by the hour making many futile efforts to catch this rhythm and
make my limbs obey it. Nobody else watched these efforts in lonely
Glen Sannox excepting Madge, and she, I told her, had more fun than
a Bosnian gypsy training his bear. I can still hear the slopes of
Glen Sannox echoing the clear notes of her ringing laughter, whenever
I made an awkward and clumsy movement in my persistent efforts to
master the Highland fling or reel. She could not help it, and I did
not mind it, because I had made up my mind to do the trick or die.
Finally I did it, not very well, but well enough for a fellow who was
not a Scotchman, and Madge presented me with my portrait in pencil,
which she drew during the intermissions between my efforts to master
the art of the Highland dances. That was my reward and it was a very
good one; she was a most promising young artist who had won several
prizes in the Greenock art school. The memory of this experience always
recalled to my mind the thoughts which went through my head at that
time--the thoughts, namely, that Scotch originality, individuality,
and sturdiness are hard to follow, not only when a foreigner meets
these wonderful qualities in the mental activity of a Scot, like the
mental activity of a Maxwell, but also in physical activity like that
displayed in the national dances of Scotland. One does not appreciate
fully the wonderful qualities of the Scot until he tries to master
the theory and the practice of the Highland fling or reel. Maxwell’s
electrical theory, I thought, might be just as different from other
electrical theories as the Highland dances are different from the
dances of other nations. I found out later that my guess was not very
far from the truth.
Several years ago I was driving through the streets of London,
visiting England again after an absence of many years. Suddenly I saw
a crowd watching a Scotch dancer. The dancer was a young woman in
Highland costume, and she was dancing the sword dance exquisitely;
her husband was playing the bagpipes, marching up and down with all
the swagger of the Scotch Highlander. I stopped my cab, got out, and
watched. The memories of Corrie and Oban and of the gathering of the
clans there which I witnessed while at Arran came back, and I was
thrilled. Presently the dancer reached me in her tour soliciting
voluntary contributions. I threw a sovereign into her plate and she
looked surprised and asked me whether I had not made a mistake.
“Yes,” said I, “I did make a mistake when I went out with only one
sovereign in my pocket. If I had two you should have them both.” “Are
you a Scotchman, sir?” she asked jokingly, and when I said “No” she
smiled and said: “I did not think you were.” She knew that there was a
fundamental difference between a Scot and a Serb.
After I had been at Corrie for about a month a letter arrived from
my mother, written by my oldest sister, telling me how happy she was
that I had decided to spend my summer in Scotland for the purpose of
meditating over the life and the work of one of the greatest “saints of
science.” I meant Faraday when I wrote to her. She also told me that
Idvor was fearfully dusty on account of a long-continued drought, and
that the crops were poor and the vintage prospects even poorer, and
that Idvor was not a very cheerful place during that summer for anybody
who wished to meditate free from complaints of grumbling neighbors.
“Berlin, I am told, is much nearer to Idvor and when you are there you
can always run down to Idvor, much more easily than you can now,” she
said, closing her letter, in which logic and motherly love vied with
each other to furnish her with a consolation for my absence from Idvor
during that summer.
My mother’s letter made me feel guilty and it called for a
reconsideration of my first resolution, adopted a month earlier, which
authorized me to bid a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical
Researches”; and I passed another resolution rescinding my first.
But the question arose, how to carry it into effect. The answer was
obvious: bid good-by to Corrie. My friends, however, suggested a less
obvious but certainly a much more agreeable answer. “Go up and live in
the Macmillan homestead, and read your Faraday there in the morning
and come down to Corrie for dinner, late in the afternoon,” suggested
Madge, and the suggestion was adopted without a dissenting voice on the
part of my young friends.