When he entered the University of Edinburgh, James Clerk Maxwell still occasioned some concern to the more conventional amongst his friends by the originality and simplicity of his ways. His replies in ordinary conversation were indirect and enigmatical, often uttered with hesitation and in a monotonous key. While extremely neat in his person, he had a rooted objection to the vanities of starch and gloves. He had a pious horror of destroying anything—even a scrap of writing paper. He preferred travelling by the third class in railway journeys, saying he liked a hard seat. When at table he often seemed abstracted from what was going on, being absorbed in observing the effects of refracted light in the finger-glasses, or in trying some experiment with his eyes—seeing round a corner, making invisible stereoscopes, and the like. Miss Cay used to call his attention by crying, “Jamsie, you're in a prop.” He never tasted wine; and he spoke to gentle and simple in exactly the same tone. On the other hand, his teachers—Forbes above all—had formed the highest opinion of his intellectual originality and force; and a few experienced observers, in watching his devotion to his father, began to have some inkling of his heroic singleness of heart. To his college companions, whom he could now select at will, his quaint humour was an endless delight. His chief associates, after I went to the University of Glasgow, were my brother, Robert Campbell (still at the Academy), P. G. Tait, and Allan Stewart.

That part of the old estate of Middlebie which remained to the heirs of Maxwell was situate on the right or westward bank of the Water of Orr, or Urr, in Kirkcudbrightshire, about seven miles from Castle-Douglas, the market-town, ten from Dalbeattie, with its granite quarries, and sixteen from Dumfries. It consisted chiefly of the farm of Nether Corsock, and the moorland of Little Mochrum. But, before building, Mr. Clerk Maxwell by exchange and purchases had added other lands to these, including the farm of Upper Glenlair. The site chosen for the house was near to the march of the original estate, where a little moor-burn from the westward falls into the Urr. The two streams contain an angle pointing south-east, opposite the heathery brae which hides the village of Kirkpatrick Durham. There, on a rising ground above the last descent towards the river and the burn, a mansion-house of solid masonry, but of modest dimensions, had been erected. It was built of dark-gray stone, with a pavement and a “louping-on-stane” of granite before the front door. On the southward slope, towards the burn, was a spacious garden-ground and a plantation beyond it, occupying the den or dingle on either side the burn, and coming round to westward of the house and garden, where it ended in a shrubbery, by which the house was approached from the north. On the eastward slope, towards the Water of Urr, was a large undivided meadow for the “kye” and the ponies.

Before placing his son at Cambridge Mr. Clerk Maxwell had, as was usual with him, consulted various persons, including Professor James Forbes and Professor Kelland of Edinburgh, Professors Thomson and Blackburn of Glasgow, and Charles Mackenzie, afterwards Bishop of Natal, then a Lecturer of Caius College, Cambridge. Forbes strongly advised Trinity, and offered an introduction to Whewell; but after various reasons urged for Trinity, Caius, and Peter house, the decision was in favour of Peterhouse.

Maxwell's first impression of college life, like that of some other clever freshmen, was not one of unalloyed satisfaction. He was transplanted from the rural solitudes of Galloway into the midst of a society which was of curious interest to him, but did not make him feel immediately at home. He found himself amongst the freshmen spelling out Euclid again, and again “monotonously parsing” a Greek play. He had brought with him his scraps of gelatine, gutta percha, and unannealed glass, his bits of magnetised steel, and other objects, which were apt to appear to the uninitiated as “matter in the wrong place.” And this in the home of science! Nor were his experiments facilitated by the casual “dropping-in” of the average undergraduate.

His boyish spirits and his social temper, together with the novelty of the scene, and a deep-rooted presentiment of the possibilities of Cambridge, no doubt made even his first term a happy one.

After his recovery from the attack of erysipelas at Glenlair in 1865, Maxwell's health appears to have been fairly good until the spring of 1877. He then began to be troubled with dyspeptic symptoms, especially with a painful choking sensation after taking meat. He consulted no one for about two years. But one day in 1877, on coming into the Laboratory after his luncheon, he dissolved a crystal of carbonate of soda in a small beaker of water, and drank it off. A little while after this he said he had found how to manage so as to avoid pain. The trouble proved obstinate, however, and at last, on the 21st of April 1879, he mentioned it when writing to Dr. Paget about Mrs. Maxwell.

By this time his friends at Cambridge had begun to observe a change in his appearance, and some failure of the old superabundant energy. They missed the elasticity of step, and the well-known sparkle in his eye. During the Easter Term of 1879 he attended the Laboratory daily, but only stayed a very short time. At the end of the term he remarked that he had been unable to do much more than to give his lectures. And before leaving Cambridge for the vacation, he was more than once very seriously unwell.

In June he returned, as usual, to Glenlair. His letters continued to be marked by humorous cheerfulness, and, as was always the case, contained information about everything and everybody except himself.

In a work which has more than one author, it is right to distinguish as far as possible what has been contributed by each.

The first part of this book, then, has been mainly composed by the present writer (who has acted as editor), and the second by Mr. Garnett; but it is due to Mr. Garnett to add that, while he had the chief share of the labour of collecting materials for the whole biography, and the entire burden of the account here given of Maxwell's contributions to science, the substance of Chapters XI. XII. XIII. is also largely drawn from information obtained through him. The matter of whole pages remains almost in his very words, although for the sake of uniformity and simplicity the first person has still been used in speaking of my own reminiscences.

The narrative of Maxwell's early life has been facilitated—(1) by a diary kept by Maxwell's father from 1841 to 1847, and often referred to in these pages as “the Diary;” (2) by two albums containing a series of water-colour drawings by Maxwell's first cousin, Mrs. Hugh Blackburn (née Isabella Wedderburn), the value of which may be inferred from the outlined reproductions of a few of them prepared by Mrs. Blackburn herself as illustrations for this book. They are literally bits out of the past, each containing an exact representation, by a most accurate observer and clever draughtswoman, of some incident which had just happened when the sketch was made.

At the close of the memoir published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Mr. W. D. Niven, referring to Maxwell's scientific work, says:—

It will probably be many years before an approximate estimate can be formed of the value of Maxwell's work. In the following pages no attempt has been made to give more than a brief account of a few of his principal contributions to science. The chief subjects referred to have, for convenience, been arranged in the following order:—

1. Experiments on Colour Vision and other contributions to Optics.

2. Investigations respecting Elastic Solids.

3. Pure Geometry.

4. Mechanics.

5. Saturn's Rings.

6. Faraday's Lines of Force, and Maxwell's Theory of the Electro-magnetic Field, including the Electro-magnetic Theory of Light and other investigations in Electricity.

7. Molecular Physics.