INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR – ‘A REGULAR BRICK’ –
TO HIS ILLUSTRIOUS STUDENT
HOPKINS, William.
Address delivered at the Hull Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September 7, 1853, by William Hopkins …
London, Taylor & Francis, 1853.
8vo, pp. [2], 20; very lightly toned, but a very good copy; in recent marbled boards with printed label to front board; ink inscription ‘F. Galton Esq / with the Author’s / kind regards’ to title (very slightly trimmed).
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Address delivered at the Hull Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, September 7, 1853, by William Hopkins …
First edition, an 1853 Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by its President William Hopkins (1793–1866), inscribed by the author and given to his erstwhile student Francis Galton (1822–1911). A mathematician and geologist, Hopkins became President of the British Association in 1853. In this, his opening address at the Hull meeting in September of that year, he surveys recent scientific advancements in such fields as astronomy, mechanics, physics, meteorology, geology, and biology, encompassing the work of such Victorian luminaries as James Prescott Joule, John Russell Hind, William Parsons, William Thomson, and William Rankine.
Provenance: barred from becoming a Cambridge fellow on account of his wife, Hopkins spent most of his life as mathematics tutor to some of the most noted scientists of Victorian Britain, which earned him the nickname ‘senior-wrangler maker’. Among his illustrious pupils were Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, and Francis Galton, a noted polymath who made important advances in such fields as mathematics, anthropology, geology, meteorology, exploration, and psychology. It was to Galton that Hopkins presented this paper, as evidenced from the title-page. Though aged only thirty-one at the time, Galton had been something of a child prodigy and would later become a significant figure in the British Association, presenting numerous papers throughout his time there and serving as Secretary between 1863 and 1867. Of Hopkins’s teaching, Galton later wrote that “Hopkins to use a Cantab expression is a regular brick; tells funny stories connected with different problems and is no way Donnish; he rattles us on at a splendid pace and makes mathematics anything but a dry subject by entering thoroughly into its metaphysics. I never enjoyed anything so much before” (Pearson, cited in ODNB).
