Cambridge man to take up the matter a few years later. James Clerk Maxwell, by whom the problem was eventually solved, was born in 1831, the son of a landed proprietor in Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Edinburgh, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which society he became in 1855 a Fellow; and not long after his election to Fellowship, he communicated to the Cambridge Philosophical Society the first of his endeavours[1] to form a mechanical conception of the electro-magnetic field.
Maxwell had been reading Faraday's Experimental Researches; and, gifted as he was with a physical imagination akin to Faraday's, he had been profonudly impressed by the theory of lines of force. At the same time, he was a trained mathematician; and the distinguishing feature of almost all his researches was the union of the imaginative and the analytical faculties to produce results partaking of both natures. This first memoir may be regarded as an attempt to connect the ideas of Faraday with the mathematical analogies which had been devised by Thomson.
Maxwell considered first the illustration of Faraday's lines of force which is afforded by the lines of flow of a liquid. The lines of force represent the direction of a vector; and the magnitude of this vector is everywhere inversely proportional to the cross-section of a narrow tube formed by such lines. This relation between magnitude and direction is possessed by any circuital vector; and in particular by the vector which represents the velocity at any point in a fluid, if the fluid be incompressible. It is therefore possible to represent the magnetic induction B, which is the vector represented by Faraday's lines of magnetic force, as the velocity of an incompressible fluid. Such an analogy had been indicated some years previously by Faraday himself,[2] who had suggested that along the lines of magnetic force there may be a "dynamic condition," analogous to that of the electric current, and
