Abstract
POPULAR lectures rarely contain much that deserves repetition or notice in a review. But when the lecturer is Sir William Thomson and his subject navigation, we may be sure that we shall hear something that we have not heard before, and that we should hear, if we wish to keep abreast of the advance of nautical science. When a reformer contents himself with merely making suggestions and leaving it to others to test them, his work is comparatively easy and its results are proportionally valueless. The suggestions of Sir W. Thomson have the very special merit that they are submitted to a practical test before he gives them utterance, and after he has done so he is far from considering his connection with them over. Every part of every crude idea or novel appliance is submitted to a searching process of natural selection which must cost the author as much labour as to watch it gives the onlooker pleasure, and those who see only the final survival of the fittest cannot form anything like a just conception of the time and pains which have been bestowed on the rejection of the less fit.
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Sir William Thomson on Navigation 1 . Nature 15, 403–404 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015403a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015403a0