walked for an hour round the court-yard of Somerset House, arguing that Faraday ought not to be elected: and the pupil was known to say that the greatest of all his great advantages was that he had a model to teach him what he should avoid. Yet Faraday in 1819 was the recipient of words from Davy, which show that the patron had then overcome all selfish feeling and wished him well.

"It gives me great pleasure to hear that you are comfortable at the Royal Institution, and I trust that you will not only do something good and honorable for yourself, but also for your science."

During this time his days were of course employed in the laboratory, but "with reference to my evenings they are thus engaged :-On Monday evening there is a scientific meeting of members here, and every other Monday a dinner, to both of which my company is requisite. On Tuesday evening I have a pupil, who comes at six o'clock and stops till nine, engaged in private lessons. On Wednesday the Society requires my aid. Thursday is my only evening for accidental engagements. Friday, my pupil returns and stops his three hours; and on Saturday I have to arrange my little private business."

The spectacle of a philosopher in love is a little peculiar. Faraday had written in his common-place book against love, and was not known to have any tender feelings in that direction; yet in 1820 he wrote to Miss Sarah Barnard, the daughter of an elder in the Sandemanian Church, who had seen these passages, and knew how averse he was to matrimony: "You have converted me from one erroneous way; let me hope you will attempt to convert what others are wrong:" with much more in the way of tender entreaty. Miss Barnard showed the letter to her father, who said that love made philosophers into fools. Her youth (she was ten years his junior) and her fears made her hesitate to accept Faraday, and she escaped from London to postpone any decision. Faraday left too in hot pursuit, and did not return again to the routine of life and business till the fair one was captured. obstacles being removed, they were married on the twelfth of June, 1821, Faraday desiring that the day should be just like any other day, and so offending some of his near relations by not asking them to the wedding. The lady made him a happy man for forty-seven years, and twenty-eight years after the marriage, Faraday said, "the union has nowise changed except in the depth and strength of its character." He took his wife home with him

All

to the Institution, having already been appointed the superintendent of the house and laboratory. Among the records and events of his life he speaks, in 1847, of his marriage as "one which," as a source of honor and happiness, far exceeds all the rest; and Dr. Tyndall adds: "In all his relations to his wife he added chivalry to affection." They lived constantly together, and whenever business called him from home for even two or three days, letters full of gushing sentiment were said to come from the great philosopher. His married life was indeed one constant romance of tender and holy love.

Soon after his marriage he united with the Sandemanian Church, of which in 1840 he became an elder. He did this without consulting his wife, and in reply to her subsequent questioning he said of his decision, "That is between me and my God." When he entered the meeting-house he used to leave his science behind. him, and would listen to the prayer and exhortation of the most illiterate brother with an attention which showed how he loved the

word of truth, from whomsoever it came. "His religion was by no means a harsh form of Calvinism, but a simple, child-like faith, rather evincing itself in the deep humility which ran through his life." When he was fifty-three he wrote

"There is no philosophy in my religion. I am of a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians, and our hope is founded on the faith that is in Christ. But though the natural works of God can never by any possibility come in contradiction with the higher things that belong to our future existence, and must with everything concerning Him ever glorify Him, still I do not think it at all necessary to tie the study of the natural sciences and religion together, and in my intercourse with my fellow-creatures, that which is religious and that which is philosophical have ever been two distinct things." "He refused to bring to bear upon the highest things those mental operations which he delighted to apply to very high things. In religion he neither investigated nor reasoned. He inherited the peculiar and simple High Calvinism of the followers of Glass and Sandeman, and he kept his faith to the end. His sect was founded by two Scotch Presbyterians [1728], early in the last century. He preached as the elder of his small church. The present writer* found out the dull and ugly Sandemanian meeting-house, in a court behind the Barbican, and heard the brilliant and philosophical lecturer preach. He complained (this was fifteen years after his first election as an elder) that his memory was failing; he spoke earnestly and quietly, but without a tittle of that real power with which he two days before had lectured on science. Texts were

* London Spectator, 1870.

VOL. XXIII.-8

strung together, but they often had little or no connection; while the doctrines which were enunciated were backed by quotations not always correctly given or thoroughly understood. The discourse was in fact pious but unintelligent. The whole service was in fact very wearisome, and the attention of the small congregation languid in the extreme. Yet, however curious and unintelligent his form of faith and his convictions as to its origin and place may seem, Faraday did, after all, carry his religion into his daily life, and even though unconsciously, into his philosophy. He was honest, manly, noble; full of tender kindness and care; he pressed every power of his intellect into the service of the God of nature and of man, and it is rightly said of him that not half his greatness was incorporate with his science, for science could not reveal the bravery and delicacy of his heart."

He was now engaged in what has been called his higher scientific education. He was a most frequent contributor, and part of the time the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science, and he was gaining daily in reputation as a chemist and man of general science. He had opened a correspondence with the late Prof. G. De La Rive, of Geneva, the man who had so kindly encouraged him while the youthful companion of Davy on the continent, and whose experiments on Sounding Flames, Faraday with modest self-trust had already corrected. He had begun in 1827 a course of Juvenile Lectures on Chemistry, which he conducted with remarkable success for nine years. He had declined in the same year the Professorship of Chemistry in the London University, and in 1829 had become lecturer at the Royal Academy, Woolwich. From the assistant in the Laboratory of the Royal Institution, he had become its director. He had constantly lectured in the great theatre, and he had probably saved the Institution by taking the most active part in the establishment of the Friday evening meetings. He had made two leading discoveries, the one on electro-magnetic motions, the other on condensation of several gases into liquids. He had carried out two important and most laborious on the alloy of steel, and on the manufacture of optical glass. He had discovered two new chlorides of carbon; among the products of the decomposition of oil by heat he had found the bicarburet of hydrogen, or benzol; he had determined the combination of sulphuric acid and naphthaline, and the formation of a new body, sulpho-naphthalic acid; and he had made the first experiments on the diffusion of gases, a subject which has become, by the researches of Professor Graham, of the utmost importance. He had had sixty important scientific papers printed, and nine of these had

been honored with a place in the Philosophical Transactions of the Institution. Had his life of research ended even here it might well have been called a noble success.

The Friday evening lectures, just alluded to as saving the existence of the Royal Institution, became very popular. The writer in the Edinburgh Review gives a very graphic description of the enthusiasm they awakened:

"To attend these lectures became the fashionable rage-the rush up the Institution stairs was only to be compared to the old rush on a Jenny Lind night. Then there really was something worth seeing and hearing, even for those who did not pretend to scientific tastes. There was something so taking, so generally kind, so affectionate in his manner toward his audience, his devotion to his subject so shone in every word and action, whilst his perfect simplicity only heightened the effect of his natural eloquence, that people came to see and hear him not so much for the sake of his science as for the sake of the man. It must not be supposed, however, that men of science themselves did not benefit from his lectures. No one before or since Faraday has been able to lecture as he did. The clearness of his statements, the orderly arrangement of his matter, was so perfect that when lecturing on some new and difficult point of experiment or theory, the merest tyro came away with the idea that he understood the whole bearings of the subject, whilst the men of science, who next to the lecturer knew, perhaps, most about the question, always found material for thought, and not unfrequently incentives to renewed exertion. Then Faraday's manner in lecturing was perfectly natural; everything went so smoothly, his experiments were so convincing and always so successful, that one might be apt to think that all this was the result of a happy intuitive power. Those who knew Faraday can tell, however, by what patient labor these results were brought about-how he used to spend hours upon hours arranging his experiments so as to ensure success-how no detail was too minute to escape his attention, and how well he had thought over the best mode of presenting his subject."

The next twenty-five years dating from 1830, was the period of Faraday's great work. Giddiness and loss of memory brought on by overdoing compelled him to desist for four years, but aside from this his whole energies were given to his researches as, in Dr. Tyndall's words, "the greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen." Into the progressive steps by which his discoveries were made, involving as they do considerable scientific definition we cannot now enter, but the methods which led to his discoveries are of deepest interest to all. He said in 1860:

"I was never able to make a fact my own without seeing it; and the description of the best works altogether failed to convey to my mind such a knowledge of things as to allow myself to form a judgment upon them. It was so with new things. If Grove, or Wheatstone, or Gassiot, or any other told me a new fact, and wanted my opinion, either of its value, or the cause or the evidence it could give on any subject, I never could say anything until I had seen the fact. . . . All my work had to be my own."

He used to say that it required twenty years of such work in becoming acquainted with facts to make a man in Physical Science. He always had some great object of research in view, but in its pursuit he frequently alighted on facts of collateral interest, to examine which he sometimes turned aside from his direct course. To him the main value of a fact was its position and suggestiveness in the general sequence of scientific truth, and having established the existence of a phenomenon, his habit was to look at it from all possible points of view, and to develop its relationship to other phenomena. When an experimental result was obtained, it was instantly enlarged by his imagination.

"I am acquainted," says Dr. Tyndall, "with no mind whose power and suddenness of expansion at the touch of new physical truth could be ranked with his. Sometimes I have compared the action of his experiments upon his mind to that of highly combustible matter thrown into a furnace; every fresh entry of fact was accompanied by the immediate development of light and heat. The light, which was intellectual, enabled him to see far beyond the boundaries of the fact itself, and the heat, which was emotional, urged him to the conquest of this newly revealed domain. But though the force of his imagination was enormous, he bridled it like a mighty rider, and never permitted his intellect to be overthrown. In virtue of the expansive power which his vivid imagination conferred upon him, he rose from the smallest beginnings to the grandest ends."

His researches assumed at times a speculative character such that it was difficult to follow him.

"In his speculations he mixes together light and darkness in varying proportions, and carries us along with him through strong alternations of both. . . Still across them flash frequent gleams of prescient wisdom which will excite admiration through all time, while the facts, relations, principles and laws, which his experiments have established are sure to form the body of grand theories yet to come."

On August 29th, 1831, Faraday began his electrical researches. In ten days of experiment that Fall when the October leaves were brightening with autumnal tints, he made the discovery of Magne