"Yet, though few, if any—Clerk-Maxwell perhaps only excepted—ever possessed the same almost magical quality of physical insight, none could be more strict than Lord Kelvin in requiring demonstration freed from untenable assumptions or undemonstrable hypotheses. Daring as he was, at least in his earlier days, in the application of analytical methods to the phenomena of nature, he was in several ways very conservative. For example, he never would countenance the use in physics of the method of quaternions. At the British Association Meeting at Cambridge in 1845, he had met Hamilton, who there read his first paper on Quaternions. One might have thought that the young enthusiast would have readily welcomed a new and ingenious method of symbolic analysis: but it was not so. He would not use quaternion notation or quaternion methods himself, nor did he admit the into his work."