Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/18

 to become an advocate like himself. But the youth's success as an investigator in mathematics and physics suggested to such friends as Forbes, Kelland, Thomson and Blackburn, a scientific career, and it was Maxwell's own conviction that he was better fitted to grapple with the laws of nature than with the laws of the land. His former school fellow Tait, after studying mathematics and physics for one brief session at the University of Edinburgh, had taken up the regular course of study at the University of Cambridge; and he wished to follow. His father was at length persuaded, with the result that Maxwell became a member of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, at the age of 19. Tait was a member of the same college, now entering on the third and last year of his undergraduate course. Thomson was now a fellow of that college.

The change to Cambridge involved a great discontinuity; and Maxwell by nature loved continuity in all his life and surroundings. The investigator of rolling curves and the compression of solids was now obliged to turn his attention again to the Elements of Euclid, and to finding out by the aid of lexicon and grammar the meaning of a Greek play. But, worse still, he found that his fellow students in Peterhouse had no sympathy with physical manipulations. He had brought with him from his laboratory a pair of polarizing prisms, the gift of the inventor Nicol, pieces of unannealed glass, magnets, jampots, guttapercha, wax, etc.; why he should fool with these things was beyond the comprehension of the young gentlemen who lodged and studied in the same college. At the end of his first year Maxwell migrated to Trinity College, the largest foundation of the University, then governed by Whewell who had a broad interest in all the sciences. Physical experimenting was not then so fashionable at Cambridge as it is now; Newton, indeed, made his experiments on light in Trinity College, but very little had been done since his days. In the college of Newton, Maxwell found not only congenial spirits, but soon came to be looked up to as a leader by a set of admiring followers. During his undergraduate years Maxwell found time to contribute various papers to the Cambridge and