Acoustics: Theoretical Part I

Abstract

IF the Delegates of the Clarendon Press are able to carry out their programme, it will be possible before long for English students to learn Physics in their native language. Besides Thomson and Tait's “Natural Philosophy,” which, if completed in the same way as it has been begun, will be a book for a nation to be proud of, they promise us a series of separate educational treatises on the several branches of Physics. Of these there are already published Dr. Balfour Stewart's excellent treatise on Heat, and the work mentioned at the head of this notice. This, unhappily, is only a fragment, forming part of the general theoretical introduction to a treatise on Sound and the principles of Music which the author did not live to write. But, although its quality is such as to make us keenly sensible of the loss which English science has suffered by the author's removal before he had completed the work, the part that is published treats of subjects of so fundamental a nature, and so little dependent on what would have followed them, that its intrinsic value is probably not much lessened by the absence of the remainder.

Acoustics: Theoretical. Part I.

By W. F. Donkin, &c., Savilian Professor of Astronomy, Oxford. Pp. 202. (Clarendon Press, 1870.)