Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait - School of Mathematics ...

LECTURER AND TEACHER 17
has attained to great and solid scientific acquirements, and to very much of that
habitual accuracy which his rival, Mr Maxwell, possesses by a sort of intuition.
We have never heard Mr Tait lecture, but we should augur from all we can learn
that he will have great powers of impressing and instructing an audience such as
his class will consist of, combined with that conscientious industry which is so
necessary in a successful professor."
Whoever wrote these vi^ords or suppHed the underlying thoughts had
formed a just estimate of the respective strengths of the candidates. Fuller
was certainly one of the greatest mathematical teachers any Scottish University
vk'as unsurpassed in Cambridge as a trainer of Senior
ever possessed ; Routh
Wranglers and has, moreover, left his mark on dynamical science ;
Maxwell
towers as one of the creative geniuses of all time, curiously lacking though
he was in the power of oral exposition ; Tait, who possessed, also by intuition,
the clearest physical conceptions, has left behind him a great record of
research both in mathematics and physics, while, as a teacher and clear
exponent of physical laws and principles, he took a foremost place among his
contemporaries.
He had all the gifts of a born lecturer. His tall form and magnificent
head at once impressed the student audiences which gathered year after year
on the opening day of the session. The impression was deepened as with
easy utterance, clear enunciation, and incisive phrase, he proceeded to indicate
the nature of the subject of study.
J. M. Barrie in An Edinbtirgh Eleven gives a graphic picture
lecturing :
of Tait
" Never, I think, can there have been a more superb demonstrator. I have his
burly figure before me. The small twinkling eyes had a fascinating gleam in them ;
he could concentrate them until they held the object looked at ; when they flashed
round the room he seemed to have drawn a rapier.
I have seen a man fall back
in alarm under Tait's eyes, though there were a dozen benches between them. These
eyes could be merry as a boy's, though, as when he turned a tube of water on
students who would insist on crowding too near an "
experiment
This is good ;
but
in some other respects Barrie's pen portrait is unsatisfactory
if not misleading. For example in the succeeding paragraph he states that
" Tait's science weighed him to the earth "—a remark almost too grotesque to
need refutation. With regard to the real character of the man whose eyes
could flash rapier-like glances or scintillate with heartiest merriment Barrie
had, indeed, little chance of intimate knowledge. Tait used to speak of
T. 3