But listen, what harmony holy Is mingling its notes with our own! The discord is vanishing slowly, And melts in that dominant tone. And they that hav… - James Clerk Maxwell

I have also cleared the electromagnetic theory of light from all unwarrantable assumption, so that we may safely determine the velocity of light by measuring the attraction between bodies kept at a given difference of potential, the value of which is known in electromagnetic measure.

I
My soul’s an amphicheiral knot
Upon a liquid vortex wrought
By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
While thou dost like a convict sit
With marlinspike untwisting it
Only to find my knottiness abiding;
Since all the tools for my untying
In four-dimensioned space are lying,
Where playful fancy intersperses
Whole avenues of universes;
Where Klein and Clifford fill the void
With one unbounded, finite homaloid,
Whereby the Infinite is hopelessly destroyed. II
But when thy Science lifts her pinions
In Speculation’s wild dominions,
I treasure every dictum thou emittest;
While down the stream of Evolution
We drift, and look for no solution
But that of the survival of the fittest.
Till in that twilight of the gods
When earth and sun are frozen clods,
When, all its energy degraded,
Matter in æther shall have faded,
We, that is, all the work we’ve done,
As waves in æther, shall for ever run
In swift-expanding spheres, through heavens
beyond the sun. III
Great Principle of all we see,
Thou endless Continuity!
By thee are all our angles gently rounded;
Our misfits are by thee adjusted,
And as I still in thee have trusted,
So let my methods never be confounded!
O never may direct Creation
Break in upon my contemplation,
Still may the causal chain, ascending,
Appear unbroken and unending,
And, where that chain is lost to sight
Let viewless fancies guide my darkling flight
Through Æon-haunted worlds, in order infinite.
∂p/∂t

This characteristic of modern experiments — that they consist principally of measurements — is so prominent, that the opinion seems to have got abroad, that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals. If this is really the state of things to which we are approaching, our Laboratory may perhaps become celebrated as a place of conscientious labour and consummate skill, but it will be out of place in the University, and ought rather to be classed with the other great workshops of our country, where equal ability is directed to more useful ends. But we have no right to think thus of the unsearchable riches of creation, or of the untried fertility of those fresh minds into which these riches will continue to be poured. It may possibly be true that, in some of those fields of discovery which lie open to such rough observations as can be made without artificial methods, the great explorers of former times have appropriated most of what is valuable, and that the gleanings which remain are sought after, rather for their abstruseness, than for their intrinsic worth. But the history of science shews that even during the phase of her progress in which she devotes herself to improving the accuracy of the numerical measurement of quantities with which she has long been familiar, she is preparing the materials for the subjugation of the new regions, which would have remained unknown if she had been contented with the rough methods of her early pioneers. I might bring forward instances gathered from every branch of science, shewing how the labour of careful measurement has been rewarded by the discovery of new fields of research, and by the development of new scientific ideas. But the history of the science of terrestrial magnetism affords us a sufficient example of what may be done by experiments in concert, such as we hope some day to perform in our Laboratory.