During this period he wrote some papers for the _Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal_ which will be referred to again later. He was also a member of a discussion society known as the “Apostles,” and some of the essays contributed by him are preserved by Professor Campbell. Mr. Niven, in his preface to the collected edition of Maxwell’s works, suggests that the composition of these essays laid the foundation of that literary finish which is one of the characteristics of Maxwell’s scientific writings. Among his friends at the time were Tait, Charles Mackenzie of Caius, the missionary bishop of Central Africa, Henry and Frank Mackenzie of Trinity, Droop, third Wrangler in 1854; Gedge, Isaac Taylor, Blakiston, F. W. Farrar,[14] H. M. Butler,[15] Hort, V. Lushington, Cecil Munro, G. W. H. Tayler, and W. N. Lawson. Some of these who survived him have given to Professor Campbell their recollections of these undergraduate days, which are full of interest. Thus Mr. Lawson writes[16]:-- “There must be many of his quaint verses about, if one could lay hands on them, for Maxwell was constantly producing something of the sort and bringing it round to his friends, with a sly chuckle at the humour, which, though his own, no one enjoyed more than himself. “I remember Maxwell coming to me one morning with a copy of verses beginning, ‘Gin a body meet a body going through the air,’ in which he had twisted the well-known song into a description of the laws of impact of solid bodies. “There was also a description which Maxwell wrote of some University ceremony--I forget what--in which somebody ‘went before’ and somebody ‘followed after,’ and ‘in the midst were the wranglers, playing with the symbols.’ “These last words, however meant, were, in fact, a description of his own wonderful power. I remember, one day in lecture, our lecturer had filled the black-board three times with the investigation of some hard problem in Geometry of Three Dimensions, and was not at the end of it, when Maxwell came up with a question whether it would not come out geometrically, and showed how, with a figure, and in a few lines, there was the solution at once. “Maxwell was, I daresay you remember, very fond of a talk upon almost anything. He and I were pupils (at an enormous distance apart) of Hopkins, and I well recollect how, when I had been working the night before and all the morning at Hopkins’s problems, with little or no result, Maxwell would come in for a gossip, and talk on while I was wishing him far away, till at last, about half an hour or so before our meeting at Hopkins’s, he would say, ‘Well, I must go to old Hop.’s problems’; and, by the time we met there, they were all done.