CHAPTER I - BIRTH AND PARENTAGE

Summary

One who has enriched the inheritance left by Newton and has consolidated the work of Faraday,—one who impelled the mind of Cambridge to a fresh course of real investigation,—has clearly earned his place in human memory.

But there was more in James Clerk Maxwell than is implied in any praise that can be awarded to the discoverer, or in the honour justly due to the educational reformer,—much, indeed, which his friends feel they can but partly estimate, and still less adequately describe.

We have, notwithstanding, undertaken this imperfect Memoir of him, in which the purpose of this First Part will be to trace the growth from childhood to maturity, and to record the untimely death, of a man of profound original genius, who was also one of the best men who have lived, and, to those who knew him, one of the most delightful and interesting of human beings.

If I can bring before the reader's mind, even in shadowy outline, the wise and gentle but curiously blended influences which formed the cradle of his young imagination, the channels through which ideas reached him from the past, the objects which most challenged his observation and provoked his invention, his first acquaintance with what permanently interested him in contemporary speculation and discovery, and the chief moments of his own intellectual progress in earlier years,—such record should have a right to live.