Obituary notices of fellows deceased

Abstract

It would be impossible in an obituary of ordinary length to convey any idea of the many-sided activity by which Lord Kelvin was continually transforming physical knowledge, through more than two generations, more especially in the earlier period before practical engineering engrossed much of his attention in importunate problems which only he could solve. It is not until one tries to arrange his scattered work into the different years and periods, that the intensity of his creative force is fully realised, and some otion is acquired of what a happy strenuous career his must have been in early days, with new discoveries and new aspects of knowledge crowding in upon him faster than be could express them to the world. The general impression left on one's mind by a connected survey of his work is overwhelming. The instinct of his own country and of the civilised world, in assigning to him a unique place among the intellectual forces of the ast century, was not mistaken. Other men have been as great in some special department of physical science: no one since Newton—hardly even Faraday, whose limitation was in a sense his strength—has exerted such a masterful influence over its whole domain. He might have been a more learned mathematician or an expert chemist; but he would then probably have been less activity, the immediate grasp of connecting principles and relations; each subject that he tackled was transformed by direct hints and analogies brought to bear from profound contemplation of the related domains of knowledge. In the first half of his life, fundamental results arrived in such volume as often to leave behind all chance of effective development. In the nidst of such accumulations he became a bad expositor; it is only by tracing his activity up and down through its fragmentary published records, and thus obtaining a consecutive view of his occupation, that a just idea of the vistas continually opening upon him may be reached. Nowhere is the supremacy of intellect more impressively illustrated. One is at times almost tempted o wish that the electric cabling of the Atlantic, his popularly best known achievement, as it was one of the most strenuous, had never been undertaken by him; nor even, perhaps, the practical settlement of electric units and instruments and methods to which it led on, thus leaving the ground largely prepared for the modern refined electric transformation of general engineering. In the absence of such pressing and absorbing distractions, what might the world not have received during the years of his prime in new discoveries and explorations among the inner processes of nature.