JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. 393 



school of physicists has arisen, to whom one might justly apply the 

 title of Maxwellites. They have applied the general theorems of 

 Maxwell to special cases in electricity and magnetism, and have 

 adopted his nomenclature and his methods. The treatise is an ex- 

 hau-tive one, and marks a new era in the history of the development 

 of electro-dynamics. The chief characteristic of Maxwell's mathe- 

 matical methods is their conciseness. Where Continental mathema- 

 ticians, contemporary with himself, are diffuse, and occupy pages, 

 Maxwell condenses into a few lines. This condensation makes him a 

 difficult author to read. His constant endeavor is to release himself, 

 as he expresses it, " from the thraldom of Cartesian co-ordinates." 



Maxwell was in no sense a narrow mathematician. In one place, in 

 his treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, he says : " It was perhaps 

 for the advantage of science that Faraday, though thoroughly con- 

 scious of the fundamental forms of space, time, and force, was not 

 a professed mathematician. He was not tempted to enter into many 

 interesting researches in pure mathematics which his discoveries 

 would have suggested if they had been exhibited in a mathematical 

 form, and he did not feel called upon either to force his results into a 

 shape acceptable to the mathematical taste of the time, or to express 

 them in a form which mathematicians might attack. He was thus 

 left at leisure to do his proper work, to co-ordinate his ideas with 

 his facts, and to express them in natural, untechnical language." 

 Throughout his treatise Maxwell constantly refers to the physical 

 conceptions of Faraday, and claims merely to translate these con- 

 ceptions into mathematical language. Maxwell and Faraday will go 

 down to posterity together : the work of one cannot be fully inter- 

 preted without that of the other. 



Maxwell was the first physicist to frame an intelligent and compre- 

 hensive electro-dynamic theory of Light. This theory is constantly 

 gaining ground, and the day is probably not far distant when the 

 Professor of Optics will need to supplement his course by a consider- 

 ation of the relations between the phenomena of electricity and those 

 of light. In molecular physics he was regarded as facile princeps. 



We have thus rapidly glanced at the few facts which are known in 

 regard to the short life of Maxwell. The great public hardly know 

 his name, and the notice taken of his death by his scientific contem- 

 poraries seems hardly worthy of his deeds. He was to the scientific 

 world what a Bismarck or a Gladstone is to the political world. He 

 had no time to devote to popularizing science : this labor was left to 

 men better fitted for it. He represents the highest type of a scien- 



