Thus Mr. Lawson writes[16]:—
“There must be many of his quaint verses about, if one could lay hands on them, for Maxwell was constantly producing something of the sort and bringing it round to his friends, with a sly chuckle at the humour, which, though his own, no one enjoyed more than himself.
“I remember Maxwell coming to me one morning with a copy of verses beginning, ‘Gin a body meet a body going through the air,’ in which he had twisted the well-known song into a description of the laws of impact of solid bodies.
“There was also a description which Maxwell wrote of some University ceremony—I forget what—in which somebody ‘went before’ and somebody ‘followed after,’ and ‘in the midst were the wranglers, playing with the symbols.’
“These last words, however meant, were, in fact, a description of his own wonderful power. I remember, one day in lecture, our lecturer had filled the black-board three times with the investigation of some hard problem in Geometry of Three Dimensions, and was not at the end of it, when Maxwell came up with a question whether it would not come out geometrically, and showed how, with a figure, and in a few lines, there was the solution at once.
“Maxwell was, I daresay you remember, very fond of a talk upon almost anything. He and I were pupils (at an enormous distance apart) of Hopkins, and I well recollect how, when I had been working the night before and all the morning at Hopkins’s problems, with little or no result, Maxwell would come in for a gossip, and talk on while I was wishing him far away, till at last, about half an hour or so before our meeting at Hopkins’s, he would say, ‘Well, I must go to old Hop.’s problems’; and, by the time we met there, they were all done.
“I remember Hopkins telling me, when speaking of Maxwell, either just before or just after his degree, ‘It is not possible for that man to think incorrectly on physical subjects’; and Hopkins, as you know, had had, perhaps, more experience of mathematical minds than any man of his time.”
The last clause is part of a quotation from a diary kept by Mr. Lawson at Cambridge, in which, under the date July 15th, 1853, he writes:—
“He (Hopkins) was talking to me this evening about Maxwell. He says he is unquestionably the most extraordinary man he has met with in the whole range of his experience; he says it appears impossible for Maxwell to think incorrectly on physical subjects; that in his analysis, however, he is far more deficient. He looks upon him as a great genius with all its eccentricities, and prophesies that one day he will shine as a light in physical science—a prophecy in which all his fellow-students strenuously unite.”
How many who have struggled through the “Electricity and Magnetism” have realised the truth of the remark about the correctness of his physical intuitions and the deficiency at times of his analysis!