Notes

Abstract

THE Delegates of the Clarendon Press will shortly publish an “Elementary Treatise on Electricity,” by the late Prof. James Clerk Maxwell, edited by Mr. W. Garnett, formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. The book was commenced about seven years ago, but its completion wa1; prevented by the author's other engagements; so that during the last three years of his life very little was added to tie work. After his death the first portion of the manuscript, on Statical Electricity, was found in a finished state, as well as some chapters on Current Electricity. The book has been completed so as to cover the subjects included in the first volume of the larger Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by a selection of some of the simpler articles from the last-mentioned work. As in the larger treatise, the “method of Faraday” has been followed throughout; but no knowledge of the higher mathematics has been assumed, and geometrical methods have been almost everywhere adopted. Very much of the matter contained in the work will, we are informed, be new to readers who had not the advantage of attending Prof. Maxwell's lectures at Cambridge, and the whole book bears indelibly the stamp of Prof. Maxwell's originality. It is as much unlike any other book on electricity as the “Theory of Heat” or “Matter and Motion” is unlike other books on thermodynamics or mechanics. The Clarendon Press likewise have nearly ready for publication a second edition of Prof. Clerk Maxwell's “Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism,” edited by Mr. W. D. Niven, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.