It can be inferred from what I have already said that this traditional policy did not suit me. I do not think that it would have suited any American student of those days who had a taste for physics. I said once to a Cambridge friend that my landlady, Routh, and rowing shaped the daily events of my life. He saw my point and admitted that each one of them represented a powerful determining factor in the life of a Cambridge student who was preparing for the mathematical tripos examinations. Each one of them had its deep roots in ancient traditions from which it was difficult to deviate. Routh was a rare product and a loyal apostle of the tradition called the Mathematical Tripos. It was perhaps the most powerful of all Cambridge traditions and stood as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar; its great strength was the fact that it had produced many distinguished men of science. But nevertheless some of the greatest living Cambridge physicists of those days felt that it had defects and called for remedies. It was claimed that its method, having no direct connection with the nascent problems of scientific research, was artificial and unproductive. Sir William Thomson, known later as Lord Kelvin, was among the first who called for speedy remedies. He was the second wrangler in 1845 and Stephen Parkinson was the senior wrangler. Thomson left Cambridge and went to Paris to get from the famous physicist Regnault what he could not get at Cambridge. After a year, when only twenty-two years old, he accepted a professorship in physics and directorship in physical research at the University of Glasgow. The long-headed Scotch were fully thirty years ahead of Cambridge in establishing a research laboratory in physics. Here Thomson worked out the scientific elements of the first Atlantic cable, and invented the instruments necessary for its operation. When I was in Cambridge the name of Thomson was attached to most measuring instruments employed in the electrical industries at that time, and he was also one of the leaders of abstract scientific thought. He represented in the popular mind the new spirit of Cambridge. Stephen Parkinson, Thomson’s superior in the tripos test of 1845, was still in Cambridge when I was there, and had to his credit a text-book on geometrical optics, with stereotyped problems, suitable for tripos examinations. He was not among those who called for a change in the traditional mathematical tripos examinations at Cambridge. Maxwell, undoubtedly inspired by Thomson, was one of the earliest leaders of the Cambridge movement which demanded a modification of the mathematical tripos, favoring more the spirit of research and less the art of solving cleverly formulated mathematical problems. The Cavendish Physics Laboratory, organized by Maxwell and first opened in 1874, was, according to Niven, a concrete expression of this movement.