If one dismisses the Prophetess Deborah who in her famous song after the victory over the Philistines sang "The mountains melted before the Lord" and her contemporary (on our time scale), the Egyptian Amenemhet, who designed the water clock, which was in fact the prototype of the capillary viscometer, the beginnings of modern rheology should be linked up with the works of the classics of natural sciences of the 19th century: J ames Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Ludwig Boltzmann, whose names are associated with the origination of the fundamental concepts of rheology. The founda tions of...