Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/272

260 manner, but can hardly be said to have developed any theories or system of his own.

As. an expositor, Professor Clifford was peculiarly and remarkably gifted. Aside from his mathematical attainments, this was the intellectual quality for which he was the most distinguished. His power in this direction is thus described by the "Pall Mall Gazette": "His faculty of explaining the results of scientific investigation in ordinary language, and to persons having little or no special preparation, was such as to amount of itself to genius. The grasp and width of his imagination enabled him to deal freely with the very ideas of the higher mathematics, unfettered by the symbolical expressions and machinery which had first made their conception possible; and he translated the ideas into forms of wonderful simplicity for hearers who little suspected the height and difficulty of the achievement. Long ago, in Cambridge days, he would discuss some complicated theorem of solid geometry, without aid of paper or diagram, in such a way as to make the whole thing seem visibly embodied in space and self-evident. Where the text-books gave a chaos of algebraical manipulation, he would instantly seize the real facts and relations and bring them out into manifest light. Nor did this power fail him even in the most arduous flights of modern geometrical speculation. He was the first in this country to see and enforce the important philosophical bearings of what is called imaginary geometry. His last published paper which saw the light only a few days before we knew that his work was irrevocably ended, was devoted to explaining with singular felicity and clearness the ultimate foundations of the science of number." The capacity here referred to was so unique and remarkable in Professor Clifford as to win for him a somewhat exaggerated reputation for originality; that is, he would so vividly and ingeniously present a difficult subject as almost to make the views expounded his own.

Among his other accomplishments, Clifford was a skillful gymnast, and as original in his performances as in his intellectual work. He was always executing some striking or eccentric feat, such as hanging head downward, by his toes, and drinking a glass of wine without spilling it; or going up to his room in the college by the water-spout and through the window, instead of the regular staircase. He had more pride in the invention of adventurous and daring gymnastic feats than in his intellectual work. He seems, indeed, to have used his gymnastic exercises as expressions of his genius rather than as means of promoting health. He was of a slender constitution, which was ever on the strain, in one direction or another; and there is reason to think that he was deficient in the important art of taking care of himself, and that, if he had conformed to the first requirement of morality, the duty of doing good to the nature that was in his own charge, he might have done, far more good to the world by a prolonged and increasingly useful life.