And you, ye undevelopable scrolls! Above the host wave your emblazoned rolls, Ruled for the record of his bright inventions. Ye cubic surfaces! by threes and nines Draw round his camp your seven-and-twenty lines-- The seal of Solomon in three dimensions. March on, symbolic host! with step sublime, Up to the flaming bounds of Space and Time! There pause, until by Dickinson depicted, In two dimensions, we the form may trace Of him whose soul, too large for vulgar space, In _n_ dimensions flourished unrestricted. IN MEMORY OF EDWARD WILSON, _Who repented of what was in his mind to write after section._ RIGID BODY (_sings_). GIN a body meet a body Flyin’ through the air, Gin a body hit a body, Will it fly? and where? Ilka impact has its measure, Ne’er a ane hae I; Yet a’ the lads they measure me, Or, at least, they try. Gin a body meet a body Altogether free, How they travel afterwards We do not always see. Ilka problem has its method By analytics high; For me, I ken na ane o’ them, But what the waur am I? Another task, which occupied much time, from 1874 to 1879, was the edition of the works of Henry Cavendish. Cavendish, who was great-uncle to the Chancellor, had published only two electrical papers, but he had left some twenty packets of manuscript on Mathematical and Experimental Electricity. These were placed in Maxwell’s hands in 1874 by the Duke of Devonshire. Niven, in his preface to the collected papers dealing with this book, writes thus:-- “This work, published in 1879, has had the effect of increasing the reputation of Cavendish, disclosing as it does the unsuspected advances which that acute physicist had made in the Theory of Electricity, especially in the measurement of electrical quantities. The work is enriched by a variety of valuable notes, in which Cavendish’s views and results are examined by the light of modern theory and methods. Especially valuable are the methods applied to the determination of the electrical capacities of conductors and condensers, a subject in which Cavendish himself showed considerable skill both of a mathematical and experimental character. “The importance of the task undertaken by Maxwell in connection with Cavendish’s papers will be understood from the following extract from his introduction to them:-- “‘It is somewhat difficult to account for the fact that though Cavendish had prepared a complete description of his experiments on the charges of bodies, and had even taken the trouble to write out a fair copy, and though all this seems to have been done before 1774, and he continued to make experiments in electricity till 1781, and lived on till 1810, he kept his manuscript by him and never published it.