It is of course idle to speculate as to what he might have accomplished if left to his original investigation. The problem which he now took up was much more difficult than any of his preceding tasks. It would have seemed, however, quite as hopeless to those who lived before Ohm's laws, to look for a single complete law of the resistance of the electrical current in the circuit or of the overtones in music, as it is to us to think of a simple mathematical formula for atomic relations. What Ohm accomplished in these other cases by his wonderful power of eliminating all the unnecessary factors in the problem, would surely have helped him here. The main power of genius, after all, is its faculty of eliminating the superfluous, which always obscures the real question at issue to such a degree for ordinary minds, that they are utterly unable to see even the possibility of a simple solution of it. Art has been defined as the elimination of the superfluous; discovery in science might well be defined in the same terms. Under the circumstances, we cannot help regretting that Ohm was not allowed the time and the opportunity to work out the thoughts with which he was engaged. It would have been even more satisfactory if the precious years of his ripe middle age had not been wasted in trivial, conventional tasks, so that he might have been permitted to devote his academic leisure, sooner than was actually the case, to the problem which had been so constantly in mind since he made his great generalization in the laws of electricity. Unfortunately, most of Ohm's time had now to be taken up with his teaching duties. Only for his self-sacrifice in the matter, his success as a teacher would doubtless have been less marked. Science itself must have suffered, however, from this pre-occupation of mind with a round of conventional duties, since Ohm could no longer devote his time to original research. In the meantime, his great discovery was coming to its own. During these ten years since the publication of his book, a number of distinguished physicists in every country--Poggendorff, and especially Fechner, in Germany, Jacobi and Lenz in Russia, Henry in America, Rosenkoeld in Sweden, and De Heer in Holland--took up the problems of the current strength of electricity as set forth in Ohm's law, and confirmed his conclusion by their investigations along similar lines. The French physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences, Pouillet, applied Ohm's ideas to thermo-electricity and pyro-electricity, employing his terms and bringing his work to the notice of foreigners generally, so that a translation of Ohm's work was made into English.