CHAP. I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 7 



Mr. John Clerk Maxwell's own idiosyncrasy, as 

 has been said, was well suited for a country life. But 

 to give a true idea of him it is necessary to be more 

 precise. His main characteristic, beyond a warm, 

 affectionate heart, the soundest of sound sense, and 

 absolute sincerity, was a persistent practical interest 

 in all useful processes. 1 When spending his holidays 

 at Penicuik as a boy from the Edinburgh High School 

 (as well as long afterwards), he took delight in watching 

 the machinery of Mr. Cowan's paper-mill, then recently 

 established in that neighbourhood. And Mr. E. D. 

 Cay remembers him, when still a young man living in 

 India Street with his mother (about 1821-24), to have 

 been engaged, together with John Cay, who was after- 



1 He never lost an opportunity of inspecting manufactures, or of 

 visiting great buildings, ecclesiastical or otherwise, and he impressed 

 the same habit upon his son. The " works " they " viewed " together 

 were simply innumerable, but it will be sufficient to cite one crowning 

 instance. When *James Clerk Maxwell was in the midst of his last 

 year's preparation for the Cambridge Tripos, he proposed to spend the 

 few days of Easter vacation which the pressure of his work allowed to 

 him, in a visit to a friend at Birmingham. His father had seen Bir- 

 mingham in his youth, and gave him the following instructions, which 

 were mostly carried out : " View, if you can, armourers, gunmaking 

 and gunproving swordmaking and proving Papier-mdchJe and 

 japanning silver-plating by cementation and rolling ditto, electro- 

 type Elkington's works Brazier's works, by founding and by strik- 

 ing out in dies turning spinning teapot bodies in white metal, etc. 

 making buttons of sorts, steel pens, needles, pins, and any sorts of 

 small articles which are curiously done by subdivision of labour and 

 by ingenious tools glass of sorts is among the works of the place, arid 

 all kinds of foundry works engine-making tools and instruments 

 optical and [philosophical], both coarse and fine. If you have 

 had enough of the town lots of Birmingham, you could vary the 

 recreation by viewing Kenil worth, Warwick, Leamington, Stratford-on- 

 Avon, or such like." James began with the glassworks. 



