Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/49

 that Tait I am sure could not conceive of any higher compliment. Maxwell had facetiously referred to Thomson as T and to Tait as T1. Hence the Treatise on Natural Philosophy came to be commonly referred to as T and T1 in the conversation of mathematicians.

It appears that the introduction of the quaternion method was a serious point of difference between the joint authors. Prof. Thomson, as you know, subsequently became Lord Kelvin and recently he wrote to Prof. Chrystal as follows with respect to the joint authorship of the Treatise. "I first became personally acquainted with Tait a short time before he was elected professor in Edinburgh; but, I believe, not before he became a candidate for the chair. It must have been either before his election or very soon after it that we entered on the project of a joint treatise of natural philosophy. He was then strongly impressed with the fundamental importance of Joule's work, and was full of vivid interest in all that he had learned from and worked at, with Andrews. We incessantly talked over the mode of dealing with energy which we adopted in the book, and we went most cordially together in the whole affair. He gave me a free hand in respect to names, and warmly welcomed nearly all of them. We have had a thirty-eight years' war over quaternions. He had been captivated by the originality and extraordinary beauty of Hamilton's genius in this respect, and had accepted, I believe, definitely, from Hamilton to take charge of quaternions after his death, which he has most loyally executed. Times without number I offered to let quaternions into Thomson and Tait, if he could only show that in any case our work would be helped by their use. You will see that from beginning to end they were never introduced."

In 1864 Tait published in the North British Review articles on "The dynamical theory of heat" and "Energy" which were afterwards made the basis of his Sketch of Thermodynamics published in 1868. The articles, mainly historical, are written from the British point of view, so much so, that he was accused of Chauvinism. To this charge he replied, "I cannot pretend