Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/567

 William. Ernest was a believer in the supreme right of kings, and set aside the Constitution which William had granted in 1833. At the same time he called on the public officers of the country, including the professors in the university, to take an oath of allegiance to him and of obedience to his new rule. Weber with six of his fellow-professors—Jacob and William Grimm, Dahlmann, Albrecht, Gervinus, and Ewald—protested against the arbitrary act, and refused to conform to it. "The entire effect of our work," they said, "depends not more surely on the scientific value of our teaching than on our personal freedom from reproach. So soon as we appear before the students as men who trifle with their oaths, our efficiency is at an end. And what would the oath of our fidelity and homage be worth to his Majesty the King, if it came from men who had just frivolously set aside another sworn obligation?" For this refusal the seven professors—"the Göttingen seven" they are called—were removed from their chairs, and three of them (Gervinus, Dahlmann, and Jacob Grimm) were expelled from the country. After this event Weber lived in retirement as a private teacher in Göttingen till 1843, when he was called to be Professor of Physics in the University of Leipsic. According to a German biographer, he never felt quite at home in Leipsic, and gladly accepted an invitation in 1849 to his old place in the Georgia Augusta at Göttingen, where he spent the rest of his life, "with rare fullness of enjoyment pursuing his learned work, never anxious about the show of success, but finding complete satisfaction in the peculiar joys of scientific achievement, furnishing thus a shining example in opposition to the restlessness of our age."

With his eldest brother, Ernst Heinrich, who, a physician, with particular devotion to anatomy and physiology, had become interested in the solution of certain difficult questions in physics, Weber engaged in the investigation of some of the phenomena of wave-motion. The result was the publication, in 1825, when Weber was twenty-one years old, of the book Die Wellenlehre auf Experimente gegrundet (The Doctrine of Waves, based on Experiments), a volume of five hundred and seventy-four pages, with eighteen copper plates, mostly engraved by the authors. One of the striking results of the investigations was the discovery that, when a regular series of waves follow each other along the surface of water, the particles at the surface describe vertical circles, the plane of which is parallel to the direction of propagation of the waves, and those lower down ellipses, of which the vertical axis becomes smaller and smaller with increasing depth. The work was, according to the declaration of the authors, the result of such constant and intimate communication between them with regard to all the parts that it was impossible to assign