Derivation of maxwells equation

[quantumfireball]

When i did my undergraduate course in electromagnetism i never heard of or never told by
the professors of "the Physical lines of force" the classical paper by J.C Maxwell.
I want to know why is that students are not taught(or encouraged) to go through this classic,why is that maxwell equations are just taught to be emperical when a lot of underlying theoretical work was done by Maxwell,to arrive at the eqns.
No doubt the underlying physics is wrong(aether,displacement of aether etc...)
but it still hopefully should result in an intuitive grasp of the subject.
Im planning to go through the paper thoroughly even after 2 and half years of taking the formal course

 

[Peeter]

Is this paper online anywhere? I did find the following:

http://www.zpenergy.com/downloads/Orig_maxwell_equations.pdf

(from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dynamical_Theory_of_the_Electromagnetic_Field#Further_reading )

which is a nice summary of some of the many E&M notations, going all the way back to Maxwell (and if one had the original maxwell paper, this would probably be helpful for reading it).

 

[quantumfireball]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:On_Physical_Lines_of_Force.pdf

 

[Peeter]

Ah, that's a web page, not a pdf ... an attempt to download it as a pdf didn't work so well;)

 

[Hootenanny]

Ah, that's a web page, not a pdf ... an attempt to download it as a pdf didn't work so well;)

It is in fact a PDF file, but wiki redirects you to a web page. You need to click on the link on that page to download the PDF.