Abstract
On behalf of the Royal Society and of the University of Cambridge it is my privilege to thank the Dean and Chapter of Westminster for permission to erect a memorial to Lord Rayleigh in the Abbey. I desire also to thank the artist, Mr. Derwent Wood, whose skill has made the memorial an excellent likeness of Lord Rayleigh, and has endowed it with artistic merits which make it worthy of a place on these walls. I desire also to thank the contributors whose generosity has made this memorial possible. I owe my position here this afternoon to the courtesy of the president of the Royal Society, and of the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Either of these would have been a more appropriate representative than myself, but it is their wish that, as chairman of the Committee of the Memorial, I should undertake this duty. It seems fitting that, on this occasion, when we place a memorial to Lord Rayleigh in a building surrounded by memorials of the most illustrious of Englishmen, a few words should be said as a tribute to his work and in support of his claim to be represented on these walls. Lord Rayleigh devoted a long life with entire singleness of purpose and pre-eminent success to the pursuit of what, in the phraseology of the Royal Society, is called “the promotion of natural knowledge.” For fifty years, without pause and without hurry, he pursued researches which are one of the glories of English science. It is possible to form an estimate of the quality and quantity of Lord Rayleigh's work by those six volumes of collected papers which we owe to the enterprise of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Among the 446 papers which fill these volumes there is not one that is trivial, there is not one that does not advance the subject with which it deals, there is not one that does not clear away difficulties; and among that great number there are scarcely any which time has shown to require correction. It is this, I think, which explains that while the collected papers of scientific men often form a kind of memorial tablet in our libraries, respected but not disturbed, those of Lord Rayleigh are among the most frequently consulted books in the physicist's library.
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The Rayleigh Memorial: Sir Joseph Thomson's Address. Nature 108, 472–474 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/108472a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/108472a0