Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/50

 to absolute accuracy, but I have taken every means of ensuring it, to the best of my ability, though it is possible that circumstances may have led me to regard the question from a somewhat too British point of view. But, even supposing this to be the case, it appears to me that unless contemporary history be written with some little partiality, it will be impossible for the future historian to compile from the works of the present day a complete and unbiased statement. Are not both judge and jury greatly assisted to a correct verdict by the avowedly partial statements of rival pleaders? If not, where is the use of counsel?"

A German physician named Mayer was struck by the amount of heat developed in the team of horses which pulled the stagecoach into his village; and he reflected on the connection between the amount of heat developed and the amount of work they 'had done. From this as a starting point he was led to investigate the nature of heat, and he arrived at the now accepted doctrine that heat is a motion of the small parts of bodies. He sought after the exact mechanical equivalent of heat, and was able to deduce it by calculation from determinations of the specific heat and some other properties of air. He had not the means for making any experiments. Tait pointed out defects in Mayer's reasoning, and minimized his contribution, because he had not made any experiments. Prof, von Helmholtz, in reply, pointed out that Mayer was not in a position to make experiments; that he was repulsed by the physicists with whom he was acquainted; that he could scarcely procure space for the publication of his paper; and that in consequence of these repulses his mind at last became affected. Tait felt that he had been taking a rather ungracious attitude towards one who had suffered much for the sake of truth in science.

It cannot be denied that Chauvinism was one of the eccentric characteristics of Prof. Tait. He had never studied on the Continent; he never traveled, I believe, beyond the narrow confines of the British Islands; and in his later years, he became something of a. recluse. What he said of the life of Rankine, applied with still greater force to his own. "The life of a