However, on the 24th of February, Mr. Blore wrote to the Electoral Roll:—
“I am authorised to give notice that Mr. John (sic) Clerk Maxwell, F.R.S., formerly Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen, and at King’s College, London, is a candidate for the professorship of Experimental Physics.”
Maxwell was elected without opposition. Writing[36] to his wife from Cambridge, 20th March, 1871, he says:—
“There are two parties about the professorship. One wants popular lectures, and the other cares more for experimental work. I think there should be a gradation—popular lectures and rough experiments for the masses; real experiments for real students; and laborious experiments for first-rate men like Trotter and Stuart and Strutt.”
While in a letter[37] from Glenlair to C. J. Munro, dated March 15th, 1871, he writes:—“The Experimental Physics at Cambridge is not built yet, but we are going to try. The desideratum is to set a Don and a Freshman to observe and register (say) the vibrations of a magnet together, or the Don to turn a watch and the Freshman to observe and govern him.”
In October he delivered his Introductory Lecture. A few quotations will show the spirit in which he approached his task.
“In a course of Experimental Physics we may consider either the Physics or the Experiments as the leading feature. We may either employ the experiments to illustrate the phenomena of a particular branch of Physics, or we may make some physical research in order to exemplify a particular experimental method. In the order of time, we should begin, in the Lecture Room, with a course of lectures on some branch of Physics aided by experiments of illustration, and conclude, in the Laboratory, with a course of experiments of research.
“Let me say a few words on these two classes of experiments—Experiments of Illustration and Experiments of Research. The aim of an experiment of illustration is to throw light upon some scientific idea so that the student may be enabled to grasp it. The circumstances of the experiment are so arranged that the phenomenon which we wish to observe or to exhibit is brought into prominence, instead of being obscured and entangled among other phenomena, as it is when it occurs in the ordinary course of nature. To exhibit illustrative experiments, to encourage others to make them, and to cultivate in every way the ideas on which they throw light, forms an important part of our duty. The simpler the materials of an illustrative experiment, and the more familiar they are to the student, the more thoroughly is he likely to acquire the idea which it is meant to illustrate. The educational value of such experiments is often inversely proportional to the complexity of the apparatus. The student who uses home-made apparatus, which is always going wrong, often learns more than one who has the use of carefully adjusted instruments, to which he is apt to trust, and which he dares not take to pieces.
“It is very necessary that those who are trying to learn from books the facts of physical science should be enabled by the help of a few illustrative experiments to recognise these facts when they meet with them out of doors. Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture-rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena, but that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.
“If, therefore, we desire, for our own advantage and for the honour of our University, that the Devonshire Laboratory should be successful, we must endeavour to maintain it in living union with the other organs and faculties of our learned body. We shall therefore first consider the relation in which we stand to those mathematical studies which have so long flourished among us, which deal with our own subjects, and which differ from our experimental studies only in the mode in which they are presented to the mind.