What a splendid example to the men of wealth to whom Tyndall was appealing! We shall see later that the appeal was not made in vain.
But the sentiments expressed at this dinner were echoes, only, of Tyndall’s thundering voice, to which America listened spellbound when he delivered the last of his course of six lectures on light. In the last part of this lecture, called “Summary and Conclusions,” he first erected what my mother would have called “a temple consecrated to the eternal truth” which we call light, and in that temple he placed what she would have called “the icons of the saints of the science” of light. The names of Alhazan, Vitellio, Roger Bacon, Kepler, Snellius, Newton, Thomas Young, Fresnel, Stokes, and Kirchhoff stood there like so many icons of saints which one sees on the altars of orthodox churches. In this he surpassed, I thought, even Maxwell and La Grange, and that was saying a great deal. He stood in the middle of that temple and challenged the statement once made by De Tocqueville that “the man of the North has not only experience but knowledge. He, however, does not care for science as a pleasure, and only embraces it with avidity when it leads to useful applications.” Tyndall proceeded to draw a clear distinction between science and its applications, pointing out that technical education without original investigations will “lose all force and growth, all power of reproduction,” just “as surely as a stream dwindles when the spring dies out.” “The original investigator,” said Tyndall, “constitutes the fountainhead of knowledge. It belongs to the teacher to give this knowledge the requisite form; an honorable and often difficult task. But it is a task which receives its final sanctification when the teacher himself honestly tries to add a rill to the great stream of scientific discovery. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the real life of science can be fully felt and communicated by the man who has not himself been taught by direct communion with nature. We may, it is true, have good and instructive lectures from men of ability, the whole of whose knowledge is second-hand, just as we may have good and instructive sermons from intellectually able and unregenerate men. But for that power of science which corresponds to what the Puritan fathers would call experimental religion in the heart, you must ascend to the original investigator.”
Many more passages could be quoted from Tyndall’s “Summary and Conclusions” of his American lectures. Suffice it to say here that the cause of scientific research in this country never had a more eloquent advocate than Tyndall. The message which he delivered in his American lecture tour in 1872–1873 was heard and heeded in every part of the United States and of the British Empire. It is no exaggeration to say that the response to this call was the movement for scientific research in American colleges and universities which dates from those memorable years. It was in its earliest days under the leadership of the famous Joseph Henry, President Barnard, and other American scientists who had associated themselves in the National Academy of Sciences which was chartered by an act of Congress in 1863.
I shall try to show in the course of this narrative that it was the greatest intellectual movement in the United States, producing results of which nobody could even have dreamed fifty years ago; and the end is not yet in sight.
Tyndall had called my attention to volume VIII of Nature. The article on Faraday I had read before, but there were a large number of other communications advocating strongly the stimulation of scientific research in colleges and universities. Tyndall’s “Summary and Conclusions” had aroused a deep interest in my mind for these things, and besides, they furnished a most welcome sidelight upon the Cambridge movement which, as described above, I had felt before I met Tyndall. The University of Cambridge was severely criticised in these communications by some Cambridge dons themselves on account of the alleged entire absence of the scientific research stimulus. One of these criticisms is so characteristic of the feeling of Cambridge in 1873 that it deserves a special reference. It is in volume VIII of Nature and is entitled: “A Voice from Cambridge.” A very brief abstract follows:
It is known all over the world that science is all but dead in England. By science, of course, we mean that searching for new knowledge which is its own reward.... It is also known that science is perhaps deadest of all at our universities. Let any one compare Cambridge, for instance, with any German university; nay, with even some provincial offshoots of the University of France.... What, then, do the universities do? They perform the functions, for too many of their students, of first-grade schools merely, and that in a manner about which opinions are divided; and superadded to these is an enormous examining engine, on the most approved Chinese model, always at work....
Not even President Barnard could have uttered a more severe criticism! The most forcible appeal was made by the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its meeting in Bradford, in September, 1873. This I also found in volume VIII of Nature. These stirring appeals were published several months after Tyndall’s lecture tour in the United States, and they all sounded to me like so many echoes of the thundering voice with which he delivered the “Summary and Conclusions” of his American lectures.
These studies, recommended by Tyndall, gave me a view of science which I did not have before. I caught a glimpse of it from the books of Maxwell and La Grange, to which I referred above. The realms of science are a strange land to a youth who enters them, just as the United States was a strange land to me when I landed at Castle Garden. Maxwell, La Grange, and Tyndall were the first to teach me how to catch the spirit of the strange land of science, and when I caught it I felt as confident as I did in Cortlandt Street after I had read and understood the early historical documents of the United States. I knew that soon I should be able to apply for citizenship in that great state called science. These were the thoughts which I carried with me when I started out for my second visit to Tyndall.
When I called on Tyndall again, a month or so after my first visit, I took along a definite plan for my future work. This pleased him, because he had advised me that every youth must think through his own head, the same advice which was given me some years later by Professor Willard Gibbs, of Yale. I assured Tyndall that my second reading of the “Summary and Conclusions,” his sixth American lecture, had cleared my vision, and that I knew perfectly what my next step should be. He was much amused when I told him how, eighteen months before, I had wandered into Cambridge like a goose into a fog, and asked me where I got that expression. I told him that it was a Serbian saying, and he looked perfectly surprised when I told him that I was a Serb by birth.
“Well, I did not decipher you as quickly as you said I did. I thought,” said he, referring to my habit of emphasizing the sound of the letter r in my pronunciation, “that you were a native American of Scotch ancestry.” “Why not of Irish?” asked I, entering into his jocose mood. “Ah, my young friend,” said he, with a merry twinkle in his eye, “you are too deliberate and too cautious to suggest the Irish type. I do not know what I would have thought had I seen you when you wandered into Cambridge ‘like a goose into a fog.’”