Nearly all the scientific notabilities of the country were present, and the coffin, preceded by the choristers and the clergy, while the hymn, "Brief life is here our portion," was sung, was followed round the cloistered aisles from St. Faith's chapel to the choir, by the relatives, representatives of His Majesty the King and the Prince of Wales, by the Royal Society, by delegates from the Institute of France, representatives of the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, and other universities, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (of which Lord Kelvin was president when he died), and of most of the learned societies of the kingdom. Then, after a short service, the body was followed to the grave in the cloisters by the same company of mourners, and to the solemn words of the Burial Service was laid close by where rests all that was mortal of Isaac Newton. There he sleeps well who toiled during a long life for the cause of natural knowledge, and served nobly, as a hero of peace, his country and the world. CONCLUSION The imperfect sketch of Lord Kelvin's scientific life and work which this book contains can only give a faint notion of the great achievements of the long life that has now ended. Beyond the researches which he carried out and the discoveries he made, there is the inspiration which his work and example gave to others. Inspired himself by Lagrange, Laplace, Ampère, and Fourier, and led to experimental research by the necessity for answers to the questions which his mathematical expression of the discoveries of the twenty-five years which preceded the establishment of his laboratory had suggested--the theories of electricity and magnetism, of heat, of elasticity, his discoveries in general dynamics and in fluid motion, the publication of "Thomson and Tait," all made him the inspirer of others; and there was no one, however eminent, who was not proud to acknowledge his obligations to his genius. Clerk Maxwell, before he wrote the most original treatise on electricity that has ever appeared, gave himself to the study of Faraday's Experimental Researches and to the papers of Thomson. And if some, like FitzGerald and others, have regretted that the electromagnetic theory of light to which Maxwell was led by Faraday, and, indeed, by Thomson himself, did not meet with a more sympathetic reception at his hands, they have not been unmindful of the source from which much of their illumination has come. He has founded a school of thought in mathematical physics, of men in whose minds the symbol is always the servant of the ideas, whose motto is interpretation by dynamical processes and models as far as that is possible, who shirk no mathematical difficulties when they have to be encountered, but are never led away from the straight road to the goal which they seek to reach--the systematic and clear formulation of the course of physical action.