OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, on the 13th of June, 

 1831. His father, who was brother to Sir George Clerk, of 

 Pennicnick, was at first known as John Clerk, bat adopted the name 

 of Maxwell on succeeding to an estate called ]STether Corsock, which 

 had come into the Clerk family through the marriage of a Miss 

 Maxwell. To this estate he added, by purchase, that of Grlenlair, the 

 name of which became afterwards closely associated with that of his 

 son. 



James Clerk Maxwell's boyhood did not at first give much promise 

 of distinction. He was a quiet and not very sprightly child, though 

 much given to reading, drawing, pictures chiefly of animals, and 

 constructing geometrical models. At the Edinburgh Academy to 

 which he was sent, he took no leading position among his school- 

 fellows till about the age of thirteen, when his mental faculties 

 began to develop rapidly, so that he was soon in every department 

 among the foremost of his contemporaries. At this school he made 

 the acquaintance of Professor Tait, the present occupant of the Chair 

 of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh University; an acquaintance 

 which, cemented as it was by kindred pursuits and interests, ripened 

 into a close and lasting friendship. 



From the Academy he passed to the University of Edinburgh, 

 where, in 1847, he attended the lectures of Kelland and Forbes. For 

 the next two or three years he had the privilege, to him invaluable, of 

 using the class apparatus in private experiments. What was the 

 nature of some of those experiments we may conjecture from a 

 perusal of his paper on Elastic Solids, written during this time, in 

 which he describes some experiments made with the view of verifying 

 the deductions of his theory in its applications to optics. 



This paper was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on Feb- 

 ruary 18, 1850, and cannot but be regarded as a wonderful pro- 

 duction when we consider the age of its author. This was the third 

 paper which Maxwell had addressed to the same Society : the first, 

 " On the Description of Oval Curves and those having a Plurality of 

 Foci," was read for him by Forbes in 1846 ; the second, under the 

 title "The Theory of Rolling Curves," was presented by Kelland in 

 1849. All these papers, therefore, were written before he came into 

 residence as an undergraduate at Cambridge in October, 1850. 



While an undergraduate at Cambridge, Maxwell carried on his 



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