He decided to be a candidate if his father approved. “For my own part,” he writes, “I think the sooner I get into regular work the better, and that the best way of getting into such work is to profess one’s readiness by applying for it.” On the 20th of February he writes: “However, wisdom is of many kinds, and I do not know which dwells with wise counsellors most, whether scientific, practical, political, or ecclesiastical. I hear there are candidates of all kinds relying on the predominance of one or other of these kinds of wisdom in the constitution of the Government.” The second part of the paper on “Faraday’s Lines of Force” was read during the term. Writing on the 4th of March, he expresses the hope soon to be able to write out fully the paper. “I have done nothing in that way this term,” he says, “but am just beginning to feel the electrical state come on again.” His father was working at Edinburgh in support of his candidature for Aberdeen, and when, in the middle of March, he returned North, he found everything well prepared. The two returned to Glenlair together after a few days in Edinburgh, and Maxwell was preparing to go back to Cambridge, when, on the 2nd of April, his father died suddenly. Writing to Mrs. Blackburn, he says: “My father died suddenly to-day at twelve o’clock. He had been giving directions about the garden, and he said he would sit down and rest a little, as usual. After a few minutes I asked him to lie down on the sofa, and he did not seem inclined to do so; and then I got him some ether, which had helped him before. Before he could take any he had a slight struggle, and all was over. He hardly breathed afterwards.” Almost immediately after this, Maxwell was appointed to Aberdeen. His father’s death had frustrated some at least of the intentions with which he had applied for the post. He knew the old man would be glad to see him the occupant of a Scotch chair. He hoped, too, to be able to live with his father at Glenlair for one half the year; but this was not to be. No doubt the laboratory and the freedom of the post, when compared with the routine work of preparing men for the Tripos, had their inducements; still, it may be doubted if the choice was a wise one for him. The work of drilling classes, composed, for the most part, of raw untrained lads, in the elements of physics and mechanics was, as Niven says in his preface to the collected works, not that for which he was best fitted; while at Cambridge, had he stayed, he must always have had among his pupils some of the best mathematicians of the time; and he might have founded some ten or fifteen years before he did that Cambridge School of Physicists which looks back with so much pride to him as their master. Leave-taking at Trinity was a sad task. He writes[23] thus, June 4th, to Mr. R. B. Litchfield:--