This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. § I. Preliminary Remarks.--The main object of the series of articles of which this is the first, is to continue the work entitled "Electromagnetic Induction and its Propagation," commenced in The Electrician on January 3, 1885, and continued to the 46th Section in September, 1887, when the great pressure on space and the want of readers appeared to necessitate its abrupt discontinuance. (A straggler, the 47th Section, appeared December 31, 1887.) Perhaps there were other reasons than those mentioned for the discontinuance. We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit. The particular branch of the subject which I was publishing in the summer of 1887 was the propagation of electromagnetic waves along wires through the dielectric surrounding them. This is itself a large and many-sided subject. Besides a general treatment, its many-sidedness demands that special cases of interest should receive separate full development. In general, the mathematics required is more or less of the character sometimes termed transcendental. This is a grandiloquent word, suggestive of something beyond human capacity to find out; a word to frighten timid people into believing that it is all speculation, and therefore unsound. I do not know where transcendentality begins. You can find it in arithmetic. But never mind the word. What is of more importance is the fact that the interpretation of transcendental formula) is sometimes B very laborious. Now the real object of true naturalists, in Sir W. Thomson's meaning of the...