CHAP. X.] ABERDEEN MARRIAGE. 275 



absorbed his best energies for more than a year. The 

 examiners for the Adam's Prize, given by St. John's 

 College in honour of the discovery of Neptune, 1 had 

 set as a subject, "The Structure of Saturn's King." 

 To frame and test an hypothesis which should account 

 for the observed phenomena was a problem of no 

 ordinary complexity, and one to which the speculative 

 imagination and mathematical ingenuity of Clerk 

 Maxwell were particularly adapted. It appears to 

 have completely fascinated him for the time. The 

 essay by which he gained the prize, and which he 

 published after elaborately revising it, is well known 

 to students, and the allusions to the subject in his 

 letters at this time will be read with interest. 



Such was the strain of feeling, and such the chief 

 intellectual interest, with which he returned to Aber- 

 deen, where he seems to have been once more destined, 

 though in his native country, to understand more than 

 he was understood ; and in his letters, together with 

 the deepening earnestness and the unfailing humour, 

 there is now and then mingled for the first time a 

 grain of bitterness, or what may be taken for such. 

 But it is rather the cry of a spirit hungering for com- 

 pletion. And the phase of disharmony quickly passes 

 off, and is followed by a song of triumph. 



Of his new acquaintances at Aberdeen he had 

 become most intimate with the family of Principal 

 Dewar of Marischal College, and he was a frequent 



1 See above, p. 85. 



