“He came to know Swift and Dryden, and after a while Hobbes, and Butler’s ‘Hudibras.’ Then, if his father was in Edinburgh, they walked together, especially on the Saturday half-holiday, and ‘viewed’ Leith Fort, or the preparations for the Granton railway, or the stratification of Salisbury Crags--always learning something new, and winning ideas for imagination to feed upon. One Saturday, February 12, 1842, he had a special treat, being taken ‘to see electro-magnetic machines.’” And again, speaking of his school-life:-- “But at school also he gradually made his way. He soon discovered that Latin was worth learning, and the Greek Delectus interested him when we got so far. And there were two subjects in which he at once took the foremost place, when he had a fair chance of doing so; these were Scripture Biography and English. In arithmetic as well as in Latin his comparative want of readiness kept him down. “On the whole he attained a measure of success which helped to secure for him a certain respect; and, however strange he sometimes seemed to his companions, he had three qualities which they could not fail to understand--agile strength of limb, imperturbable courage, and profound good-nature. Professor James Muirhead remembers him as ‘a friendly boy, though never quite amalgamating with the rest.’ And another old class-fellow, the Rev. W. Macfarlane of Lenzie, records the following as his impression:--‘Clerk Maxwell, when he entered the Academy, was somewhat rustic and somewhat eccentric. Boys called him “Dafty,” and used to try to make fun of him. On one occasion I remember he turned with tremendous vigour, with a kind of demonic force, on his tormentors. I think he was let alone after that, and gradually won the respect even of the most thoughtless of his schoolfellows.’” The first reference to mathematical studies occurs, says Professor Campbell, in a letter to his father written soon after his thirteenth birthday.[6] “After describing the Virginian Minstrels, and betwixt inquiries after various pets at Glenlair, he remarks, as if it were an ordinary piece of news, ‘I have made a tetrahedron, a dodecahedron, and two other hedrons, whose names I don’t know.’ We had not yet begun geometry, and he had certainly not at this time learnt the definitions in Euclid; yet he had not merely realised the nature of the five regular solids sufficiently to construct them out of pasteboard with approximate accuracy, but had further contrived other symmetrical polyhedra derived from them, specimens of which (as improved in 1848) may be still seen at the Cavendish Laboratory.