It must here be mentioned that Faraday, another great physicist, worked in England exactly in the same direction, and with the same object; to whom, on that account, Magnus was bound by the heartiest sympathy. With Faraday, the antagonism to the physical theories hitherto held, which treated of atoms and forces acting at a distance, was even more pronounced than with Magnus. We must, moreover, admit that Magnus mostly worked with success on problems which seemed specially adapted to mathematical treatment; as, for instance, his research on the deviation of rotating shot fired from rifled guns; also his paper on the form of jets of water and their resolution into drops. In the first, he proved, by a very cleverly arranged experiment, how the resistance of the air, acting on the ball from below, must deflect it sideways as a rotating body, in a direction depending on that of the rotation; and how, in consequence of this, the trajectory is deflected in the same direction. In the second treatise, he investigated the different forms of jets of water, how they are partly changed by the form of the aperture through which they flow, partly in consequence of the manner in which they flow to it; and how their resolution into drops is caused by external agitation. He applied the principle of the stroboscopic disk in observing the phenomena, by looking at the jet through small slits in a rotating disk. He grouped the various phenomena with peculiar tact, so that those among them which are alike were easily seen, and one elucidated the other. And if a final mechanical explanation is not always attained, yet the reason for a great number of characteristic features of the individual phenomena is plain. In this respect many of his researches--I might specially commend those on the efflux of jets of water--are excellent models of what Goethe theoretically advanced, and in his physical labours endeavoured to accomplish, though with only partial success.