The first eight chapters were complete at the time of Maxwell's death, as were parts of chapters nine and ten, though materials for these chapters were found to be disordered. The first four chapters are interspersed with descriptions of eighteen experiments illustrating phenomena described. Rather than publish the work in fragmentary form, Garnett and his collaborators decided to fill in the gaps in the Elementary Treatise by borrowing relevant sections from Maxwell's magnum opus, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, first published in two volumes in 1873 and published in a revised version in the same year as the Elementary Treatise. Owing to the almost complete absence of text for chapters eleven through thirteen of the Elementary Treatise, those chapters are largely constructed from material from the larger work.