“I have not seen Article 7, but I agree with your dissent from it entirely. On the vested interest principle, I think the men who intended to keep their fellowships by celibacy and ordination, and got them on that footing, should not be allowed to desert the virgin choir or neglect the priestly office, but on those principles should be allowed to live out their days, provided the whole amount of souls cured annually does not amount to £20 in the King’s Book. But my doctrine is that the various grades of College officers should be set on such a basis that, although chance lecturers might be sometimes chosen from among fresh fellows who are going away soon, the reliable assistant tutors, and those that have a plain calling that way, should, after a few years, be elected permanent officers of the College, and be tutors and deans in their time, and seniors also, with leave to marry, or, rather, never prohibited or asked any questions on that head, and with leave to retire after so many years’ service as seniors. As for the men of the world, we should have a limited term of existence, and that independent of marriage or ‘parsonage.’” It was more than twenty years before the scheme outlined in the above letter came to anything; but, at the time of Maxwell’s death in 1879, another Commission was sitting, and the plan suggested by Maxwell became the basis of the statutes of nearly all the colleges. For the winter session of 1857–58 he was again at Aberdeen. The Adams Prize had been established in 1848 by some members of St. John’s College, and connected by them with the name of Adams “in testimony of their sense of the honour he had conferred upon his College and the University by having been the first among the mathematicians of Europe to determine from perturbations the unknown place of a disturbing planet exterior to Uranus.” Professor Challis, Dr. Parkinson, and Sir William Thomson, the examiners, had selected as the subject for the prize to be awarded in 1857 the “Motions of Saturn’s Rings.” For this Maxwell had decided to compete, and his letters at the end of 1857 tell of the progress of the task. Thus, writing[26] to Lewis Campbell from Glenlair on August 28th, he says:-- “I have been battering away at Saturn, returning to the charge every now and then. I have effected several breaches in the solid ring, and now I am splash into the fluid one, amid a clash of symbols truly astounding. When I reappear it will be in the dusky ring, which is something like the state of the air supposing the siege of Sebastopol conducted from a forest of guns 100 miles one way, and 30,000 miles the other, and the shot never to stop, but go spinning away round a circle, radius 170,000 miles.” And again[27] to Miss Cay on the 28th of November:--