The Norman Lockyer Memorial Lecture

Abstract

ON Monday last, the first Norman Lockyer lecture, under the auspices of the British Science Guild, was delivered by Sir Oliver Lodge in the hall of the Goldsmiths Company, his subject being “The Link between Matter and Matter.” It is fitting that the Guild should thus honour the memory of the man who, more than any other, was responsible for its formation, and no happier choice for the first lecturer could have been made than that of Sir Oliver Lodge. Lockyer was essentially a man of wide vision; his mind sought instinctively for generalisations. A fact was to him only of importance in so far as it was related to the general principles which underlie all facts. He was not content with a laboratory; he would have an observatory. He was not content even with an observatory; he would have a theory which would embrace all the revelations of the laboratory and the observatory and bind the whole physical universe into a single entity. The key to Lockyer's scientific career is to be found in this overpowering tendency to generalise, and no one who is not to some extent under the dominance of the same tendency can rightly interpret the apparently erratic course which his genius led him to pursue.