18 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL. [CHAP. I. 



William also was at Leyden before going into business as a 

 lawyer, and kept a journal of his tour in Holland, which, like 

 other writings of the Clerk family, is furnished with pen and 

 ink sketches of what he saw. His letters are interesting from 

 the combination of earnest, Covenanting piety, with a gay and 

 chivalrous bearing in what was evidently the one serious love- 

 passage of his life. His letters to his wife in the years after 

 their marriage are as full of tenderness as that in which he 

 makes his first proposal is instinct with old-world gallantry. 



" They left an only daughter, Dorothea, who married her 

 first cousin, afterwards Sir George Clerk Maxwell." 



This George Clerk Maxwell probably suffered a little from 

 the world being made too easy for him in early life. Such a mis- 

 fortune was all but inevitable, and the Baron seems to have done 

 his best to obviate it by good counsel ; but the current of circum- 

 stances was too strong. George was in the habit of preserving 

 letters, and from those received by him before succeeding to 

 Penicuik it is possible to form a tolerably full impression of the 

 man. In some respects he resembled John Clerk Maxwell, but 

 certainly not in the quality of phlegmatic caution. His imagi- 

 nation seems to have been dangerously fired by the " little 

 knowledge " of contemporary science which he may have picked up 

 when at Leyden with his elder brother James (see p. 1 9, 11. 1 8, 25). 

 We find him, while laird of Dumcrieff, near Moffat, practically 

 interested in the discovery of a new " Spaw," and humoured in this 

 by his friend Allan Ramsay, the poet : by and by he is deeply 

 engaged in prospecting about the Lead Hills, and receiving 

 humorous letters on the subject from his friend Dr. James 

 Hutton, one of the founders of geological science, and author of 

 the Theory of the Earth. 1 After a while he has commenced active 

 operations, and is found making fresh proposals to the Duke of 

 Queensberry. Then to the mines there is added some talk of 



1 See " Biographical Account of the late Dr. James Hutton, F.R.S., 

 Edinburgh," read by Mr. Playfair, in Transactions of the Royal Society 

 of Edinburgh, vol. v. He made a tour in the north of Scotland in 

 1764, "in company with Commissioner, afterwards Sir George, Clerk, 

 in which Dr. Hutton's chief object was mineralogy, or rather geology, 

 which he was now studying with close attention." 



