Notes
[1] The Operatives' Lecture is always well advertised in the streets beforehand by large posters.
[2] Bulwer Lytton's Coming Race.
[3] The glass vessel ought to be broader in comparison with its height.
[4] In 1746 Benjamin Robins taught the principles of rifling as we know them now. He showed that the spin of the round bullet was the most important thing to consider. He showed that even the bent barrel of a gun did not deflect the bullet to anything like the extent that the spin of the bullet made it deflect in the opposite direction.
[5] Note.—In Fig. 16 the axis is shown inclined, but, only that it would have been more troublesome to illustrate, I should have preferred to show the precession occurring when the axis keeps horizontal.
[6] When this lecture containing the above statement was in the hands of the printers, I was directed by Prof. Fitzgerald to the late Prof. Jellet's Treatise on the Theory of Friction, published in 1872, and there at page 18 I found the mathematical explanation of the rising of a top.
[7] Roughly, the Inertia or Mass of a body expresses its resistance to change of mere translational velocity, whereas, the Moment of Inertia of a body expresses its resistance to change of rotational velocity.
[8] It is a very unlikely, and certainly absurd-looking, hypothesis, but it seems that it is not contradicted by any fact in spectrum analysis, or even by any probable theory of the constitution of the interstellar ether, that the stars are merely images of our own sun formed by reflection at the boundaries of the ether.
[9] Sir William Thomson has performed this.