A few weeks before this Lord Kelvin was at the dinner in celebration of the jubilee of the foundation of the Chemical Society. In the speech which he then made he referred to the painful accident of a year or so ago which we had all so much regretted, when he had burnt his hand accidentally in some experiments with phosphorus, and had had to carry his arm in a sling for some weeks. “Lord Rayleigh, the president of the Royal Society,” he said, “has just told us how, as a boy, he gave proof of his devotion to chemical science by burning his fingers with phosphorus--but I think my devotion must be considered greater than his, for I burnt my fingers very badly with phosphorus only last year, when I was 83 years old. It was at the end of April. My friends said I was old enough to know better, and it should have happened, not at the end of April, but on the first day, of that month.” Lord Kelvin was associated in work in the sixties and seventies with another splendid man, Tait, of Edinburgh, who, besides being a great professor of “Natural Philosophy,” and joint author of the celebrated treatise known as _Thomson and Tait_, was a great athlete--a golfer of the first class, a first-rate billiard player, and a wise lover of good ale, which he drank and gave to his friends to drink, whilst he discoursed as few, if any, to my knowledge, can now do, of things philosophical, mathematical, and humane. 29. _The So-called Jargon of Science_ It is often discussed as to whether science fails to obtain the attention of the public and to excite intelligent interest, owing to the obscure language which lecturers and writers use when attempting to expound scientific views and discoveries to “the ordinary man,” or whether the fault lies with the “ordinary man” himself, who is too frivolous to bother about following carefully the words addressed to him, and, moreover, has never learnt even the A B C of science at school. It is certainly the case, as Professor Turner, the Oxford professor of astronomy, has pointed out, that a popular lecturer could tell his auditors a good deal more in an hour if they already had the elements of his subject at their fingers’ ends than he can under the existing state of neglect of school education in the natural sciences. That, however, seems to be obvious enough, and does not touch the real question.