Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Elements of Physics, Vol. 1 of 3: A College Text-Book The beginner in Physics, if he is to be well taught, must study a text-book which contains concise statements of physical laws and a systematic development of principles. He must attend lectures or demonstrations in which the phenomena are shown, and finally he must enter the laboratory and make physical measurements. The present book deals only with the first part of this triple course of instruction. It differs in certain respects from many books which have been written for beginners. Descriptions of the numerous phenomena with which it is necessary for the student to become acquainted have been largely omitted; the assumption being that the study of the text will always be accompanied by, and indeed be supplementary to, a course of carefully arranged and fully illustrated lectures. A knowledge of the elements of the calculus, the natural language of physics, has been taken for granted, but the degree of mathematical experience of the undergraduate reader, necessarily limited, has been kept in view and the various proofs and the demonstrations have been given the simplest possible form. The concepts of directed and of distributed quantity, which are no less important to the student of physics than arc the methods of the calculus, are briefly treated in Chapter II. of Volume I. and in Chapter I. of Volume II., respectively, and are used upon occasion throughout the text. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.