ouse
man was the mathematical genius of the day. 'Eclipse was first and the
rest nowhere.' But the rumour arose that there was a 'dark man' at St.
John's, who possessed a wonderful power of throwing off paper-work at
examinations with the regularity of a machine. One of the examiners
subsequently described himself as petrified at the papers thrown off, as
if by the velocity of a steam-engine, on the part of the Johnian. At the
Cambridge Senate House examinations speed is everything; and when two
men are pretty evenly balanced the muscular power of the wrist settles
the day. Thomson was Second Wrangler, and a little more time for writing
would have made him Senior Wrangler. For the Smith's Prize he of course
distanced the Senior Wrangler and all other competitors. The worthy
Johnian, who supplanted him for the blue ribbon of the University, was,
irrationally enough, very unpopular, and has subsequently been lost
sight of in scientific history. Before Sir William Thomson there was a
great career. At twenty-one he was a fellow of his college. At
twenty-two he was a Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of
Glasgow. When little more than out of his teens, Sir William Thomson
became editor of the _Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal_,
through which a great impetus was given to the study of pure and applied
mechanics; and before the era of the Atlantic Cable he contributed many
papers on telegraphy to the Royal Society, in connection with which he
made the acquaintance and enjoyed the esteem of such men as Faraday and
Brewster. The Natural Philosophy Chair in Glasgow University he has
raised to a high rank--perhaps the highest of its kind in the world, and
students come from far and near to sit at the feet of this Gamaliel
among the physicists of his day and generation."

The Bakerian lecture, entitled "The Electro-Dynamic Properties of
Metal," was delivered by Sir William Thomson in 1855, and by that and
kindred contributions to scientific literature he was rapidly laying
the foundation of his great reputation. In 1854 he published a series of
investigations, by which he shows that the capacity of the conducting
wire for the electric charge depends on the ratio of its diameter to
that of the gutta percha covering; and in the face of much opposition he
established what is now known as the "law of squares," which asserts
that the rate of transmission is inversely as the square of the length
of the cable. These