Page:The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish v1.djvu/16

vi the University, signified his desire to build and furnish a Physical Laboratory for Cambridge: and in prospect of that gift the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics was founded by Grace of the Senate in Feb. 1871. In response to appeals from the prominent Cambridge men of the time, including Stokes, W. Thomson, and Rayleigh, Clerk Maxwell was persuaded to offer himself for the Chair. He was formally elected the following month, after six years of retired study and investigation which doubtless had matured and consolidated the intellectual interests of his life, including the preparation of the Electricity and Magnetism (Feb. 1873) and the Theory of Heat (1870). The Laboratory was planned and furnished under Maxwell's direction, and formally handed over to the University in the spring of 1874. It was not however until 1877 that the Chancellor had completed his gift "by furnishing the Cavendish Laboratory with apparatus suitable to the present state of science"; an equipment to which Maxwell afterwards contributed many additions. Later, Lord Rayleigh, when Chancellor of the University, devoted the proceeds of the award of a Nobel Prize to provide for an urgent expansion of the Laboratory of which he had himself been Director.

The Electricity and Magnetism shows many marks of hurried final consolidation with a view to immediate publication. It was said that the pressing need of a textbook in the University was a paramount consideration: there was no treatise of comparable depth and grasp at that time in any language. And certainly under Maxwell's influence Cambridge was the focus in which the new electrical ideas, inherited in outline from Faraday, were developed and propagated, years before they were taken up in other countries and thus became everywhere the mainspring of progress in physical science. Maxwell's own personal investigations during the Cambridge period, in addition to a series of brilliant articles, now classical, written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, were concerned mainly with the development of the other equally fundamental, but analytically much more complex, subjects centring round the molecular theory of gases; in this domain also he had previously (1860) been the originator of the modern exact analysis, based on application of the mathematical principles of statistics to the fortuitous dance of the innumerable molecules.

According to Maxwell's biographers his chief continuous literary occupation, for the five years from 1874 to his death in October, 1879, was the editing of the Electrical Researches of Henry Cavendish. It had been well known that Cavendish's papers, preserved in the possession of his kinsman the Duke of Devonshire, contained a very remarkable and even mysterious record of progress in electrical as well as chemical science, effected a hundred years previously by a solitary investigator, of which only fragments had been revealed by various men of science who had seen the manuscripts. The publication of an adequate account of the researches of Cavendish was a task obviously incumbent on British science, for its