MAXWELL, James Clerk.

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Matter and Motion. First edition of this late work by the Scottish physicist, "a masterpiece of natural philosophy" (Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, p. 209), and one of the first scientific texts to use the phrase "relativity". This copy is in a particularly crisp example of the original cloth binding.By 1876, Maxwell was paying closer attention to the possibilities of his role as a scientific educator. As the inaugural Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, he devised a lecture series to introduce theories of heat, electricity, and magnetism, into the Cambridge mathematical tripos. At the same time, his intellectual work was leading him to anticipate Einsteinian questions of relativity.Matter and Motion brings these concerns together as a similarly elementary, yet theoretically rigorous, study of dynamics. Discussing the "Relativity of Dynamical Knowledge", Maxwell wrote that "our whole progress up to this point may be described as a gradual development of the doctrine of relativity of all physical phenomena" (p. 84).An August 1881 ink inscription on the front free endpaper records this copy as the gift of James Richard Ainsworth Davis (1861-1834) to the Irish academic Robert William Genese (1848-1928), who had been a mathematics scholar at Cambridge during Maxwell's final years at the Cavendish Laboratory. Genese then bequeathed the book to the Mathematical Association in 1928: their library ticket is on the front pastedown.

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