Lord Kelvin: An account of his scientific life and workGray, Andrew
Science
Lord Kelvin: An account of his scientific life and work
Gray, Andrew
Kelvin, William Thomson, Baron, 1824-1907
is to be supposed, dare not possess an artistic soul to be saved; and
therefore, perhaps, it is that it builds huge and ugly caravanserais of
which no one, except perhaps the shareholders, would keenly regret the
disappearance. But both artists and antiquaries would have blessed the
directors--and such a blessing would have done them no harm--if they had
been ingenious and pious enough to leave some relic of the old buildings
as a memorial of the old days and the old life of the High Street.
A picture of the College in the High Street has recently been drawn by
one who lived and worked in it, though some thirty years after James
Thomson brought his family to live in its courts. Professor G. G. Ramsay
has thus portrayed some features of the place, which may interest those
who would like to imagine the environment in which Lord Kelvin grew up
from childhood, until, a youth of seventeen, he left Glasgow for
Cambridge.[4] "There was something in the very disamenities of the old
place that created a bond of fellowship among those who lived and worked
there, and that makes all old students, to this day, look back to it
with a sort of family pride and reverence. The grimy, dingy, low-roofed
rooms; the narrow, picturesque courts, buzzing with student-life; the
dismal, foggy mornings and the perpetual gas; the sudden passage from
the brawling, huckstering High Street into the academic quietude, or the
still more academic hubbub, of those quaint cloisters, into which the
policeman, so busy outside, was never permitted to penetrate; the
tinkling of the 'angry bell' that made the students hurry along to the
door which was closed the moment that it stopped; the roar and the flare
of the Saturday nights, with the cries of carouse or incipient murder
which would rise into our quiet rooms from the Vennel or the Havannah;
the exhausted lassitude of Sunday mornings, when poor slipshod creatures
might be seen, as soon as the street was clear of churchgoers, sneaking
over to the chemist's for a dose of laudanum to ease off the debauch of
yesterday; the conversations one would have after breakfast with the old
ladies on the other side of the Vennel, not twenty feet from one's
breakfast-table, who divided the day between smoking short cutty pipes
and drinking poisonous black tea--these sharp contrasts bound together
the College folk and the College students, making them feel at once part
of the veritable populace of the city, and also hedged off from it by
separate pursuits and interests."
The university removed in 1871 to larger and more airily situated
buildings in the western part of the city. Round these have grown up, in
the intervening thirty-eight years, new buildings for most of the great
departments of science, including a separate Institute of Natural
Philosophy, which was opened in April 1907, by the Prince and Princess
of Wales.
CHAPTER II
CLASSES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. FIRST SCIENTIFIC PAPERS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account