Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/15

 tweed tunic and frill; and his shoes were made after a peculiar design of his father's with square toes and brass buckles. So at the first recess, when they were all outside, they came about him like bees, and demanded who made his shoes, to which he replied:

They tore his tunic .and frill, and gave him the uncomplimentary nickname of "Dafty." Daft is a Scottish word meaning deficient in sense, or silly. Such was the first reception at public school of the boy who became the greatest mathematical electrician of the nineteenth century, whose electrical work in historical importance has been judged second only to that of Faraday. Had the annoyance to which young Maxwell was exposed been confined to the first few days at school, it might be set down to that disposition to haze newcomers which appears to be part of a boy's nature whether in the Old World or the New; but it was too generally persisted in, with the result that young Maxwell never quite amalgamated with the rest of the boys. There were, however, some exceptional lads who could appreciate his true worth, conspicuous among whom were Peter Guthrie Tait, afterwards Professor Tait, and Lewis Campbell, who became his biographer.

The curriculum at the Academy was largely devoted to Latin and Greek; and young Maxwell made a bad start in these subjects. A want of readiness, corresponding, I suppose, to the hesitation in his speech, kept him down, even in arithmetic. But about the middle of his school career he surprised his companions by suddenly becoming one of the most brilliant among them, gaining high, and sometimes the highest prizes for scholarship, mathematics and English verse composition. At his home in Edinburgh, his aunt's house, he had a room all to himself; it was not a study merely, but a laboratory. There before he had entered on the study of Euclid's Elements at the Academy he made out of pasteboard models of the five regular solids.