essential, and certainly has more to do than merely to telegraph to our eyes to tell us of what the molecules and atoms are about. If a first step towards understanding the relations between ether and ponderable matter is to be made, it seems to me that the most hopeful foundation for it is knowledge derived from experiment on electricity in high vacuum; and if, as I believe is true, there is good reason for hoping to see this step made, we owe a debt of gratitude to the able and persevering workers of the last forty years who have given us the knowledge we have: and we may hope for more and more from some of themselves and from others encouraged by the fruitfulness of their labours to persevere in the work.

ADDRESS

[Delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of Joule's statue in Manchester Town Hall, December 7th, 1893.]

I THANK the Committee for the great honour it has done me in asking me to be present upon an occasion so full of interest to the city of Manchester, and certainly most interesting to myself personally. The proceedings which have just taken place have given Manchester the possession of a work of art which will remain an ornament and an honour to the city. I am afraid if I were to say even a small part of what I feel upon this occasion I should tax the patience of my audience to an intolerable degree. At the same time I believe you would all wish to hear something of Joule's work.

Joule's work began in Manchester, was carried on in Manchester, and finished in Manchester. It began very early, when he was only nineteen years of age. He was not altogether a self-taught man in science. After a good ordinary school education, he had the inestimable benefit of the personal

teaching of Dalton in chemistry. He and his elder brother Benjamin were favourite pupils of Dalton. They went to his house in the rooms of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester for regular daily lessons and were a little disappointed at first when they found that Dalton, instead ΟΙ introducing them straight away to the grandeur of the atomic theory of chemistry, kept them to the grindstone, forced them to do their additions correctly, and held up to them as something essentially necessary for them to learn, the practice of trigonometry and the logarithmic tables. James Joule and his brother got great good from that early severe, almost hard, training by Dalton. They were both full of original brightness and acuteness in their observations. They went through the country even before they came to be pupils of Dalton, making memoranda of what they saw and heard, an aurora borealis or a wonderful thunderstorm, or sounds of artillery or lightning, they could not tell which. Some of their journals they afterwards showed to

Dalton, who thought so well of their descriptions that in one instance he was able to say to them, "Those sounds you heard were not human artillery but they were the thunder of an outburst of lightning at sea forty miles south of Holyhead.” The two brothers continued pupils of Dalton until the failure of his health; but for a year after that, and no doubt to the very end, they continued to receive ideas from that great man. It must not be thought that Dalton only taught them arithmetic and trigonometry. I rather emphasize that point with an eye perhaps to the young men who aspire to follow in Joule's footsteps, and upon whom I wish to impress the conviction that it was hard work early begun and persevered in and conscientiously carried out; that is the foundation of all great works, whether in literature, philosophy, or science, or in doing good to the world in any possible way. In electricity and electro-magnetism Joule, I think I may say, was wholly self-taught. All he knew he learned from his own reading— from reading in text books and in Sturgeon's Annals of Electricity, and also from conferences

with Sturgeon himself. The Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester has the distinguished honour of having been the cradle of Joule's scientific childhood when it was Dalton's home, and of being afterwards Joule's life-long scientific harbour. From those early days he kept constantly in touch with that Society. Many of his most important papers were first given to the world there, and during the last years of his life he was an exceedingly regular, it might almost be said a constant, attendant at the meetings of the Society.

An interesting and sympathetic memoir of Joule, with much important scientific information and judgment regarding his work, by Professor Osborne Reynolds, constitutes the sixth volume of the fourth series of its "Memoirs and Proceedings."

The citizens of Manchester do not require to be told what great things their Literary and Philosophical Society in its rather more than a century's existence has done for them and for the world. Your being here in such numbers on the present occasion shows how much you appreciate the results of that very effective scientific institu

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