Before placing his son at Cambridge Mr. Clerk Maxwell had, as was usual with him, consulted various persons, including Professor James Forbes and Professor Kelland of Edinburgh, Professors Thomson and Blackburn of Glasgow, and Charles Mackenzie, afterwards Bishop of Natal, then a Lecturer of Caius College, Cambridge. Forbes strongly advised Trinity, and offered an introduction to Whewell; but after various reasons urged for Trinity, Caius, and Peter house, the decision was in favour of Peterhouse.

Maxwell's first impression of college life, like that of some other clever freshmen, was not one of unalloyed satisfaction. He was transplanted from the rural solitudes of Galloway into the midst of a society which was of curious interest to him, but did not make him feel immediately at home. He found himself amongst the freshmen spelling out Euclid again, and again “monotonously parsing” a Greek play. He had brought with him his scraps of gelatine, gutta percha, and unannealed glass, his bits of magnetised steel, and other objects, which were apt to appear to the uninitiated as “matter in the wrong place.” And this in the home of science! Nor were his experiments facilitated by the casual “dropping-in” of the average undergraduate.

His boyish spirits and his social temper, together with the novelty of the scene, and a deep-rooted presentiment of the possibilities of Cambridge, no doubt made even his first term a happy one.