The summer vacation was on and I decided to take Faraday’s “Electrical Researches” to Scotland, the land of Maxwell. In the preface to his great—and to me, at that time, enigmatic—electrical treatise Maxwell modestly had stated that he was an interpreter, only, of Faraday. But I was delighted when I heard Tyndall’s suggestion that Faraday would help me to interpret Maxwell. Perhaps, thought I, the invigorating air of Maxwell’s native Scotland would help me to catch some of the ideas which Maxwell had caught when he was reading Faraday. I selected what I thought would be a quiet and secluded spot, the island of Arran. It belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, and I was told that his grace had imposed so many restrictions upon his tenants that the island had become an ideal spot for those who sought seclusion. I found there a neat little inn at Corrie. It was surrounded by several tiny cottages for summer visitors who took their meals at the inn. It was popular with people from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley. Every one of the visiting families was blessed with numerous daughters. They were very athletic and played tennis from early morning till late in the afternoon, interrupted now and then by swimming contests in the frigid waters of the Firth of Clyde. In the evening there was lively dancing—not easy-going waltzing, but the real fling and reel of the strenuous Highland type. “What a sturdy race this is,” I said to myself, as I watched the dancers working themselves up into a frenzy of rhythmic movements, one hand resting upon the hip, the other raised high up in the air, while their joyful limbs were pumping up and down in perfect rhythm as if they were busy pulling up from mother earth all the earthly joys stored up there for mortal man. The whole scene was particularly thrilling to me when a piper came along and furnished the music. The bagpipes reminded me of my native Idvor, and made me feel at home in bonny Scotland before I had been much over a week in Arran. The Scotch and the Serbs have many things in common, and I always believed that somewhere back in the history of Iran they must have belonged to the same tribe. I am told that at the Macedonian front the Scotch and the Serbian soldiers got along beautifully, as if they had known each other from time immemorial, and they had little use for the other races assembled there. I got along at Corrie as if I had known the Scotch all my life. But that had its disadvantages also. I came to Corrie looking for seclusion where, undisturbed, I could communicate with Faraday. But the lively lassies from Glasgow, Greenock, and Paisley, the tennis and the swimming contests, the fascinating sound of the bagpipes accompanying the stirring Highland dances—all these things whispered into my ear: “Faraday can wait, but your friends here cannot.” Then I remembered a passage in one of Maxwell’s letters, given in Campbell’s life of Maxwell, which said: “Well, work is good and reading is good, but friends are better.” What a splendid excuse for joining the lassies and the lads at Corrie and revelling in the healthful pursuits of their youthful exuberance! Besides, said I to myself, have I not accomplished enough during my eighteen months’ drilling under Routh, Maxwell, La Grange, Rayleigh, Stokes, and Tyndall to deserve a complete change of mental and physical activity? When a person looks for an excuse to do what he or she likes to do a splendid excuse can always be found, and so I bade a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical Researches,” and joined the playful activities of my Corrie friends, challenging them to go the limit. In tennis and swimming I held my own, but the Highland reels floored me every time, until Madge, one of the sturdy lassies from Greenock, by persistent private instruction finally succeeded in initiating me into the mysteries of the Highland rhythm. Glen Sannox, near Corrie, with its rich bed of heather, watched me often by the hour making many futile efforts to catch this rhythm and make my limbs obey it. Nobody else watched these efforts in lonely Glen Sannox excepting Madge, and she, I told her, had more fun than a Bosnian gypsy training his bear. I can still hear the slopes of Glen Sannox echoing the clear notes of her ringing laughter, whenever I made an awkward and clumsy movement in my persistent efforts to master the Highland fling or reel. She could not help it, and I did not mind it, because I had made up my mind to do the trick or die. Finally I did it, not very well, but well enough for a fellow who was not a Scotchman, and Madge presented me with my portrait in pencil, which she drew during the intermissions between my efforts to master the art of the Highland dances. That was my reward and it was a very good one; she was a most promising young artist who had won several prizes in the Greenock art school. The memory of this experience always recalled to my mind the thoughts which went through my head at that time—the thoughts, namely, that Scotch originality, individuality, and sturdiness are hard to follow, not only when a foreigner meets these wonderful qualities in the mental activity of a Scot, like the mental activity of a Maxwell, but also in physical activity like that displayed in the national dances of Scotland. One does not appreciate fully the wonderful qualities of the Scot until he tries to master the theory and the practice of the Highland fling or reel. Maxwell’s electrical theory, I thought, might be just as different from other electrical theories as the Highland dances are different from the dances of other nations. I found out later that my guess was not very far from the truth.
Several years ago I was driving through the streets of London, visiting England again after an absence of many years. Suddenly I saw a crowd watching a Scotch dancer. The dancer was a young woman in Highland costume, and she was dancing the sword dance exquisitely; her husband was playing the bagpipes, marching up and down with all the swagger of the Scotch Highlander. I stopped my cab, got out, and watched. The memories of Corrie and Oban and of the gathering of the clans there which I witnessed while at Arran came back, and I was thrilled. Presently the dancer reached me in her tour soliciting voluntary contributions. I threw a sovereign into her plate and she looked surprised and asked me whether I had not made a mistake. “Yes,” said I, “I did make a mistake when I went out with only one sovereign in my pocket. If I had two you should have them both.” “Are you a Scotchman, sir?” she asked jokingly, and when I said “No” she smiled and said: “I did not think you were.” She knew that there was a fundamental difference between a Scot and a Serb.
After I had been at Corrie for about a month a letter arrived from my mother, written by my oldest sister, telling me how happy she was that I had decided to spend my summer in Scotland for the purpose of meditating over the life and the work of one of the greatest “saints of science.” I meant Faraday when I wrote to her. She also told me that Idvor was fearfully dusty on account of a long-continued drought, and that the crops were poor and the vintage prospects even poorer, and that Idvor was not a very cheerful place during that summer for anybody who wished to meditate free from complaints of grumbling neighbors. “Berlin, I am told, is much nearer to Idvor and when you are there you can always run down to Idvor, much more easily than you can now,” she said, closing her letter, in which logic and motherly love vied with each other to furnish her with a consolation for my absence from Idvor during that summer.
My mother’s letter made me feel guilty and it called for a reconsideration of my first resolution, adopted a month earlier, which authorized me to bid a temporary farewell to Faraday’s “Electrical Researches”; and I passed another resolution rescinding my first. But the question arose, how to carry it into effect. The answer was obvious: bid good-by to Corrie. My friends, however, suggested a less obvious but certainly a much more agreeable answer. “Go up and live in the Macmillan homestead, and read your Faraday there in the morning and come down to Corrie for dinner, late in the afternoon,” suggested Madge, and the suggestion was adopted without a dissenting voice on the part of my young friends.
The Macmillan homestead was a very humble old cottage located half-way between Corrie and the top of Goat Fell Mountain, the highest point on the island of Arran. An old crofter and his wife lived there, leading one of the most frugal existences that I had ever seen anywhere. They were willing to furnish me with lodging and simple breakfast, consisting of tea and oatmeal porridge with some bread covered with a thin layer of American lard. I did not object; I was prepared to take up low living and high thinking for the love of Michael Faraday. Communion with Faraday from early morning until four in the afternoon, and after that any play that came along, with plenty of dancing in the evening, was a splendid combination. Practically one solid meal a day, my dinner at the Corrie inn, supplied the fuel for all this activity, and it did it satisfactorily. How could I complain? The man whose wonderful scientific discoveries I was absorbing each day started life as a bookbinder’s apprentice, and the founder of the great Macmillan publishing-house was born and passed his boyhood days in the humble cottage where I was lodging. I was sure that in their youth they never had more than one solid meal a day and they prospered. My rapid absorption and digestion of the mental food which Faraday offered I attributed to my avoidance of superfluous physical food, but I must confess that I was quite hungry when dinner was served at the Corrie inn, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I never understood the full meaning of low living and high thinking as well as I did while I was a lodger at the Macmillan homestead. My thinking machinery, I thought, never worked better, and even my vision, always very good, seemed to be better than ever before. On exceptionally clear days I was sure that from the high elevation of the Macmillan cottage, on the slope of Goat Fell Mountain, I could see the beautiful Firth of Clyde as far as Greenock and Paisley, and at times even the gray and gloomy edifices of Glasgow seemed to loom up in the distance. I bragged about it, but my friends at Corrie met my bragging by informing me, jokingly, that any Scotchman can see much farther than that. One of them, a pupil of Sir William Thomson at the University of Glasgow, met my bragging by the epigrammatic question: “Can you see in Faraday as far as Maxwell, the Scotchman, saw?” I never bragged again about my vision while I was in Scotland. I was certain, however, that from the Macmillan homestead on the slopes of Goat Fell Mountain I obtained a deeper view into Faraday’s discoveries than I could have obtained in any other place. I seldom mention the names of Faraday and Maxwell without recalling to memory the beautiful island of Arran and the humble Macmillan homestead on Goat Fell Mountain.
VIII
STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN
Every period in the history of mankind had its revelation in science. Some periods were most fortunate in this respect. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the great scientific revelation called the Principle of Conservation of Energy, and considered it its greatest glory. Our own American philosopher, Benjamin Thompson, of Woburn, Massachusetts, known in Europe as Count Rumford, was one of several early prophets in science who foresaw the advent of this great dynamical doctrine. Its importance to mankind cannot be overestimated. I am sure that many a scientific man of those days felt grateful to heaven for the blessing of having lived during the age when that great revelation was received by mankind. The scientific men of to-day are grateful for having lived during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the great electromagnetic theory was revealed to man. Its importance, likewise, cannot be overestimated. But there is a radical difference in the historical progress of these two nineteenth-century revelations in science. The existence of the first was intuitively foreseen and may be said to have existed in one form or another in the minds of many scientific men long before it received its final form of statement. Its formulator, Helmholtz, thought that he was not announcing anything new, but was only stating his own view of something that was already well known. After his announcement, in 1847, every scientific man accepted the revelation as an almost self-evident truth. The electromagnetic theory of light and of matter had a different history. It was born as a dim vision in the mind of a single man, Faraday, and nearly fifty years elapsed before it was formulated by Maxwell and experimentally demonstrated by Hertz. It was only then that the world began to understand that a great scientific revelation had appeared to man. To-day we know that new physical concepts requiring a new language for their expression had to be created in the minds of scientific men before the modern electromagnetic doctrine could be revealed to the world. The first glimpses of that revelation I caught on the slope of Goat Fell Mountain, and two years later I saw in Berlin what I believed to be a clear outline of its meaning.
When I look back to those days and consider how few were the physicists who had caught this meaning even twenty years after it was stated by Maxwell in 1865, I wonder whether it is possible to-day to convey that meaning to people who are not trained physicists. I think it is, and I believe that the attempt should be made, because the electromagnetic doctrine is to-day recognized to be the very foundation of all our knowledge of physical phenomena. I also think that one of the best methods of conveying that meaning is to describe my early attempts which failed to catch it.