“he still occasioned some concern to the more conventional amongst his friends by the originality and simplicity of his ways. His replies in ordinary conversation were indirect and enigmatical, often uttered with hesitation and in a monotonous key. While extremely neat in his person, he had a rooted objection to the vanities of starch and gloves. He had a pious horror of destroying anything, even a scrap of writing-paper. He preferred travelling by the third class in railway journeys, saying he liked a hard seat. When at table he often seemed abstracted from what was going on, being absorbed in observing the effects of refracted light in the finger-glasses, or in trying some experiment with his eyes--seeing round a corner, making invisible stereoscopes, and the like. Miss Cay used to call his attention by crying, ‘Jamsie, you’re in a prop.’ He never tasted wine; and he spoke to gentle and simple in exactly the same tone. On the other hand, his teachers--Forbes above all--had formed the highest opinion of his intellectual originality and force; and a few experienced observers, in watching his devotion to his father, began to have some inkling of his heroic singleness of heart. To his college companions, whom he could now select at will, his quaint humour was an endless delight. His chief associates, after I went to the University of Glasgow, were my brother, Robert Campbell (still at the Academy), P. G. Tait, and Allan Stewart. Tait went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1848, after one session of the University of Edinburgh; Stewart to the same college in 1849; Maxwell did not go up until 1850.” During this period he wrote two important papers. The one, on “Rolling Curves,” was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh by Professor Kelland--(“it was not thought proper for a boy in a round jacket to mount the rostrum”)--in February, 1849; the other, on “The Equilibrium of Elastic Solids,” appeared in the spring of 1850. The vacations were spent at Glenlair, and we learn from letters to Professor Campbell and others how the time was passed. “On Saturday,” he writes[11]--April 26th, 1848, just after his arrival home--“the natural philosophers ran up Arthur’s Seat with the barometer. The Professor set it down at the top.... He did not set it straight, and made the hill grow fifty feet; but we got it down again.” In a letter of July in the same year he describes his laboratory:-- “I have regularly set up shop now above the wash-house at the gate, in a garret. I have an old door set on two barrels, and two chairs, of which one is safe, and a skylight above which will slide up and down.