Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2016
Aeronautics is certainly the science of the future and its professors and preachers have the qualities of their science. When you were good enough to ask me to read a paper, by way of opening a discussion this evening, you told me beforehand the subject which I should select. It is a new departure, characteristic of these new times. If you will look at the practice of education in this or any other country you will find that hitherto subjects have been selected, not by those who are to hear, but by those who are to speak. They are the subjects upon which the teacher has already made up his mind. The principle of selection is that the teacher must be able to display superior knowledge and the process of education is a sort of wave of superior knowledge going down from the universities into the most elementary recesses without much regard for what it looks like from the point of view of those hungry for the knowledge of “how it goes,” and still more “why it goes?”
You have provoked this digression by giving me the subject, “Wind Gusts and the Structure of Aerial Disturbances.”
Note on page 196 * The term “puff rldquo; is here used to designate an increase in the strength of the wind lasting more than a few seconds and of moderate intensity.
Note on page 196 † Under the title, “A Peculiar Wind Effect,” in the “Yachting Monthly” (London), Vol. XIV., p. 269, January, 1913, a discussion is given of evidence given by a photograph of the yacht “ Skebenga “sailing with the lower sails showing wind from the port side, while the top sail was filled out as if by a wind from the starboard bow. This occurred in a deep–sea race at Durban, South Africa, for a Lipton Challenge Cup. The writer says,” One friend suggested a roll as the cause, but evidence of sufficient sea does not exist. Nor is there any likelihood of the yacht being by the lee … but all the sails look well filled “and hard, even the jackyarder in its unnatural position.”
Note on page 200 § A description of ripples is given by J. Russel Scott in “The Wave of Translation” (London : Trubner and Co., 18S5).