The second part of the paper on “Faraday’s Lines of Force” was read during the term. Writing on the 4th of March, he expresses the hope soon to be able to write out fully the paper. “I have done nothing in that way this term,” he says, “but am just beginning to feel the electrical state come on again.”
His father was working at Edinburgh in support of his candidature for Aberdeen, and when, in the middle of March, he returned North, he found everything well prepared. The two returned to Glenlair together after a few days in Edinburgh, and Maxwell was preparing to go back to Cambridge, when, on the 2nd of April, his father died suddenly.
Writing to Mrs. Blackburn, he says: “My father died suddenly to-day at twelve o’clock. He had been giving directions about the garden, and he said he would sit down and rest a little, as usual. After a few minutes I asked him to lie down on the sofa, and he did not seem inclined to do so; and then I got him some ether, which had helped him before. Before he could take any he had a slight struggle, and all was over. He hardly breathed afterwards.”
Almost immediately after this, Maxwell was appointed to Aberdeen. His father’s death had frustrated some at least of the intentions with which he had applied for the post. He knew the old man would be glad to see him the occupant of a Scotch chair. He hoped, too, to be able to live with his father at Glenlair for one half the year; but this was not to be. No doubt the laboratory and the freedom of the post, when compared with the routine work of preparing men for the Tripos, had their inducements; still, it may be doubted if the choice was a wise one for him. The work of drilling classes, composed, for the most part, of raw untrained lads, in the elements of physics and mechanics was, as Niven says in his preface to the collected works, not that for which he was best fitted; while at Cambridge, had he stayed, he must always have had among his pupils some of the best mathematicians of the time; and he might have founded some ten or fifteen years before he did that Cambridge School of Physicists which looks back with so much pride to him as their master.
Leave-taking at Trinity was a sad task. He writes[23] thus, June 4th, to Mr. R. B. Litchfield:—
“On Thursday evening I take the North-Western route to the North. I am busy looking over immense rubbish of papers, etc., for some things not to be burnt lie among much combustible matter, and some is soft and good for packing.
“It is not pleasant to go down to live solitary, but it would not be pleasant to stay up either, when all one had to do lay elsewhere. The transition state from a man into a Don must come at last, and it must be painful, like gradual outrooting of nerves. When it is done there is no more pain, but occasional reminders from some suckers, tap-roots, or other remnants of the old nerves, just to show what was there and what might have been.”
The summer of 1856 was spent at Glenlair, where various friends were his guests—Lushington, MacLennan, the two cousins Cay, and others. He continued to work at optics, electricity, and magnetism, and in October was busy with “a solemn address or manifesto to the Natural Philosophers of the North, which needed coffee and anchovies and a roaring hot fire and spread coat-tails to make it natural.” This was his inaugural lecture.
In November he was at Aberdeen. Letters[24] to Miss Cay, Professor Campbell, and C. J. Munro tell of the work of the session. The last is from Glenlair, dated May 20th, 1857, after work was over.
“The session went off smoothly enough. I had Sun, all the beginning of optics, and worked off all the experimental part up to Fraunhofer’s lines, which were glorious to see with a water-prism I have set up in the form of a cubical box, five inch side....