Clerk Maxwell and the Cavendish Laboratory

OF all the notable contributions to the record of the Cavendish jubilee given in the issue of Dec. 18, perhaps the most interesting to many is the one by Sir Joseph Larmor on Clerk Maxwell; for it suggests the way in which his equations, like those of the writer himself, contained the germs of many future developments, and incidentally directs attention to a Royal Society abstract which was unfortunately omitted from Maxwell's “Collected Papers.” It was customary at that period for the Royal Society to publish not only the complete paper in the Phil. Trans., but a thorough abstract also in the Proceedings—a practice which, perhaps unfortunately, has been departed from. The abstract referred to appeared in Dec. 1864, and gave in concise form the substance of one of the most remarkable memoirs of last century, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.”