Students' Physical Laboratories

Abstract

IF a protest is not made, I see some danger of the pioneer work done towards organising physical laboratory work for students in University and King's Colleges in London being inadvertently ignored, and everything of that kind attributed to Finsbury. Probably, indeed, the sound work unobtrusively done in early days is known to very few. Allow me to say, therefore, from personal knowledge, that students were admitted to physical laboratory work in these colleges before 1872—in one of them, I believe, in 1866—and that the course of quantitative laboratory instruction through which I was myself put by Prof. Carey Foster, in topographical circumstances of some difficulty, was of high value; and, indeed, reached a standard of accuracy not readily eclipsed in any students' laboratory with which I have since become acquainted.