Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/58

 honors he received were not in proportion to the greatness of his scientific achievements.

In the summer time, after the close of the University session, it was Tait's invariable custom to spend the vacation on the links at St. Andrews. He was an enthusiastic golfer, and exemplified the harmony of theory and practice. He investigated by observation and experiment the various physical phenomena, the chief of which is the long time during which the golf ball remains in the air notwithstanding the slight elevation of its path above the ground. To investigate the path and velocity of the ball he made a drive and bunker in the basement of the University building. He communicated his results to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and there stated definitely the longest distance to which a golf ball could possibly be driven. One of his sons, Frederick Guthrie Tait, acquired great skill as a golfer. He was a lieutenant in the famous regiment called Gordon Highlanders, and also the champion amateur golfer of the British Islands. Such was his fame and prowess that to the general public Tait, the eminent mathematician, became known to them from being the father of the champion golfer. Prof. Tait enjoyed his son's success immensely for the buoyant and sanguine temperament of youth remained his throughout life. But the champion golfer upset his father's calculations of the greatest possible distance by driving a ball five yards further!

In the course of his long career Tait was engaged in many polemical discussions. Look over the columns of Nature, and you will find controversies with Tyndall, Proctor, Zöllner, Poincaré, Gibbs, Heaviside and many others. He was apt to take an exaggerated view of men—Newton was nothing short of a god, Leibnitz nothing better than a devil; whereas the truth is that Newton and Leibnitz were both men of many virtues but also of some failings. Tait himself was a man of many heroic virtues, mixed with a few inconsistencies. In these polemical discussions he used exaggerated language, which was probably taken more seriously than he intended. Anyhow a stranger introduced to him in his retiring room at