The wedding took place early in June. Professor Campbell has preserved some of the letters written by Maxwell to Miss Dewar, and these contain “the record of feelings which in the years that followed were transfused in action and embodied in a married life which can only be spoken of as one of unexampled devotion.”
The project for the fusion of the two Colleges, to which reference has been made, went on, and the scheme was completed in 1860.
The two Colleges were united to form the University of Aberdeen, and the new chair of Natural Philosophy thus created was filled by the appointment of David Thomson, Professor of Natural Philosophy in King’s College, and Maxwell’s senior. Mr. W. D. Niven, in his preface to Maxwell’s works, when dealing with this appointment, writes:—
“Professor Thomson, though not comparable to Maxwell as a physicist, was nevertheless a remarkable man. He was distinguished by singular force of character and great administrative faculty, and he had been prominent in bringing about the fusion of the Colleges. He was also an admirable lecturer and teacher, and had done much to raise the standard of scientific education in the north of Scotland. Thus the choice made by the Commissioners, though almost inevitable, had the effect of making it appear that Maxwell failed as a teacher. There seems, however, to be no evidence to support such an inference. On the contrary, if we may judge from the number of voluntary students attending his classes in his last College session, he would seem to have been as popular as a professor as he was personally estimable.”
The question whether Maxwell was a great teacher has sometimes been discussed. I trust that the following pages will give an answer to it. He was not a prominent lecturer. As Professor Campbell says,[29] “Between his students’ ignorance and his vast knowledge it was difficult to find a common measure. The advice which he once gave to a friend whose duty it was to preach to a country congregation, ‘Why don’t you give it them thinner?’ must often have been applicable to himself.... Illustrations of ignotum per ignotius, or of the abstruse by some unobserved property of the familiar, were multiplied with dazzling rapidity. Then the spirit of indirectness and paradox, though he was aware of its dangers, would often take possession of him against his will, and, either from shyness or momentary excitement, or the despair of making himself understood, would land him in ‘chaotic statements,’ breaking off with some quirk of ironical humour.”
But teaching is not all done by lecturing. His books and papers are vast storehouses of suggestions and ideas which the ablest minds of the past twenty years have been since developing. To talk with him for an hour was to gain inspiration for a year’s work; to see his enthusiasm and to win his praise or commendation were enough to compensate for many weary struggles over some stubborn piece of apparatus which would not go right, or some small source of error which threatened to prove intractable and declined to submit itself to calculation. The sure judgment of posterity will confirm the verdict that Clerk Maxwell was a great teacher, though lecturing to a crowd of untrained undergraduates was a task for which others were better fitted than he.
CHAPTER IV.
PROFESSOR AT KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON.—LIFE AT GLENLAIR.
In 1860 Forbes resigned the chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. Maxwell and Tait were candidates, and Tait was appointed. In the summer of the same year Maxwell obtained the vacant Professorship of Natural Philosophy at King’s College, London. This he held to 1865, and this period of his life is distinguished by the appearance of some of his most important papers. The work was arduous; the College course extended over nine months of the year; there were as well evening lectures to artisans as part of his regular duties. His life in London was useful to him in the opportunities it gave him for becoming personally acquainted with Faraday and others. He also renewed his intimacy with various Cambridge friends.
He was at the celebrated Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, where he exhibited his colour-box for mixing the colours of the spectrum. In 1859, at the meeting at Aberdeen, he had read to Section A his first paper on the “Dynamical Theory of Gases,” published in the Philosophical Magazine for January, 1860. The second part of the paper, dealing with the conduction of heat and other phenomena in a gas, was published in July, 1860, after the Oxford meeting.