Page 44 - Fall2013

present-day reviewers might say the book is rather uneven, but it is difficult, with so many years intervening, to guess just what the possible initial readership of the books should be expected to know and what their background would have been.
The present reviewer was intrigued that, for the first chapter, with the title “Introduction,” the principal reference is to Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone. (This is the title of the English translation. A translation did not exist at the time Rayleigh wrote Volume I.) It is stated in the biography written by Rayleigh’s son that Rayleigh was told, by Donkin at Oxford, that he should learn to read German. Rayleigh chose Helmholtz’s book as a means of learning German, and this was the initial impetus to Rayleigh’s becoming interested in acoustics. So Rayleigh’s account in his very first chapter, and the decision to write the book in the first place, can be traced back to some friendly advice about learn- ing a foreign language. Looking over the extensive literature, written in a variety of lan- guages, which Rayleigh cites in a insightful manner throughout his treatise, one cannot help but be strongly convinced that the advice paid off.
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Books and Publications 43