Science and the Public 353gift, Thomson maintained, and thus through his “studies and successive
acquirements” he will be led “‘through nature up to nature’s God.’”^48
In this lecture Thomson also presented natural philosophy as a pro-
gressive, practical study that required key skills in experimental research
and the use of precision instruments, rather than as a static, logical struc-
ture that relied on illustrative experiments as a teaching device. In com-
parison to his predecessors, Thomson included far more on experimental
topics in his course, including sections on heat, hydrostatics, pneumat-
ics, acoustics, magnetism, and electricity. He also built a research labora-
tory at Glasgow College where both the professor and his students could
make precision measurements in their experiments. Precision measure-
ments reduced to absolute units represented to Thomson the exemplar
of the experimenter’s art. His approach signifi ed a radical new profession-
alism distinguished by a clear research orientation. Thomson not only
revolutionized the practice of natural philosophy in the local context of
Glasgow, he also contributed to a major transformation of British science
in terms both of incipient professionalization and of the emergence of
laboratory science.^49 The introduction of the laboratory into science in
no way involved the elimination of the religious framework of natural
philosophy. Nor did Thomson link the professionalization of science with
the exclusion of the Christian clergy from the world of science. Huxley
and Thomson therefore disagreed violently on the larger implications of
professionalizing science for the cultural authority of the Christian church
and for religious faith.
Twenty- fi ve years later, another North British Physicist echoed Thom-
son’s thoughts on the compatibility of a professional science based on
laboratory research with a profound respect for Christian ideals. James
Clerk Maxwell was appointed to the new Cavendish chair at Cambridge
in 1871, a telling symbol of the alliance between Cambridge Anglicans
and the North British Physicists. Maxwell’s chief task was to introduce
experimental physics into the mathematical and moral culture of the uni-
versity. The new course on experimental physics, Maxwell announced,
“while it requires us to maintain in action all those powers of attention
and analysis which have been so long cultivated in the University, calls on
us to exercise our senses in observation, and our hands in manipulation.
The familiar apparatus of pen, ink, and paper will no longer be suffi cient
for us.” Distinguishing between experiments of illustration, which were
educative, and experiments of research, whose “ultimate object is to mea-
sure something which we have already seen,” Maxwell affi rmed that the
latter were “the proper work of a Physical Laboratory.” In fact, Maxwell