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We had formed such a friendship with Mr. Faraday that while we lived abroad he sent me a copy of everything he published, and on returning to England we renewed our friendship with that illustrious philosopher, and attended his lectures at the Royal Institution. He had already magnetized a ray of polarised light, but was still lecturing on the magnetic and diamagnetic properties of matter.
He passed from flames to gases, examining and revealing their magnetic and diamagnetic powers; and then he suddenly rose from his bubbles of oxygen and nitrogen to the atmospheric envelope of the earth itself, and its relations to the great question of terrestrial magnetism. The rapidity with which these ever-augmenting thoughts assumed the form of experiments is unparalleled.
His first attempt to establish differences of diamagnetic action in different directions through bismuth, was also a failure; but he must have felt this to be a point of cardinal importance, for he returned to the subject in 1850, and proved that bismuth was repelled with different degrees of force in different directions.
I have already referred to the action of water upon psychic sensitives, and there seems little room for doubt that it is the psychometric sense which, by means of the self-extensive faculty inhering in consciousness, registers the presence of the great diamagnetic agent.
The capacity to be repelled was therefore not inherent in the bismuth, but induced. So far an identity of action was established between magnetic and diamagnetic bodies.
But this character of space is not of the same kind as that which, in relation to matter, we endeavour to express by the terms magnetic and diamagnetic. To confuse these together would be to confound space with matter, and to trouble all the conceptions by which we endeavour to understand and work out a progressively clearer view of the mode of action, and the laws of natural forces.
Let the subject be stationed at S. Then the rays directed towards the surface of the mirror will be represented by RR-RR. These rays impinge upon a diamagnetic surface which is concave. The rays are therefore bent inwards and thrown back upon the person at S in the form of a cone of energy which has the effect of producing auto-hypnosis.
Immersing one gas in another, he determined their differential action; results of the utmost beauty being thus arrived at. Perhaps the most important are those obtained with atmospheric air and its two constituents. Oxygen, in various media, was strongly attracted by the magnet; in coal-gas, for example, it was powerfully magnetic, whereas nitrogen was diamagnetic.
He speaks of and illustrates by sketches, the deflection, both convergent and divergent, of the lines of force, when they pass respectively through magnetic and diamagnetic bodies. These notions of concentration and divergence are also based on the direct observation of his filings.
'By a diamagnetic, says Faraday, 'I mean a body through which lines of magnetic force are passing, and which does not by their action assume the usual magnetic state of iron or loadstone. Faraday subsequently used this term in a different sense from that here given, as will immediately appear.
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