Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/102

 earlier. From 1828 to 1839 this chair was occupied by Charles Babbage who neither lectured nor resided; his successor, JosephJoshua [sic] King, seems also to have made it a sinecure. But now the electors—who are the heads of the colleges—saw in Stokes a young, talented, and enthusiastic investigator who might worthily follow in the steps of Newton. At the time of the election Peter Guthrie Tait was an undergraduate and twenty-five years later he recorded his impression of the event: "To us, who were mere undergraduates when he was elected to the Lucasian professorship, but who had with mysterious awe speculated on the relative merits of the men of European fame whom we expected to find competing for so high an honor, the election of a young, and to us unknown, candidate was a very striking phenomenon. But we were still more startled, a few months afterwards, when the new professor gave public notice that he considered it part of the duties of his office to assist any member of the University in difficulties he might encounter in his mathematical studies. Here was, we thought (in the language which Scott puts into the mouth of Richard Coeur de Lion) "a single knight fighting against the whole mêlée of the tournament." But we soon discovered our mistake, and felt that the undertaking was the effort of an earnest sense of duty or the conscience of a singularly modest but exceptionally able and learned man. And as our own knowledge gradually increased and we became able to understand his numerous original investigations, we saw more and more clearly that the electors had indeed consulted the best interests of the University, and that the proffer of assistance was something whose benefits were as certain to be tangible and real as any that mere human power and knowledge could guarantee."

Tait himself benefited by this proffer of assistance; so did Thomson and Clerk Maxwell. In fact Prof. Stokes is regarded as the principal founder of the Cambridge school of mathematical physicists, one of the main glories of the British mathematicians of the nineteenth century, the only other name having any claim to the position being that of William Hopkins who tutored them all. Thus at the age of 35 years Stokes was placed