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I copy these words from the printed abstract of a Friday evening lecture, given by myself, because they remind me of Faraday's voice, responding to the utterance by an emphatic 'hear! hear! Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. ii. p. 132.
He wrote many papers on geometrical optics and on molecular physics, but his great claim to remembrance is that he first suggested, "on the basis of Faraday's law of Electrolysis, that an absolute unit of quantity of electricity exists in that amount of it which attends each chemical bond or valency and gave the name, now generally adopted, of electron to this small quantity."
The difficulties of tracing, at least to some extent, the influence that Faraday's masterly investigations have had on the present condition of the electrical arts and sciences will, therefore, be considerably lessened.
In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday's previous works. Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation. I will confine myself here to one example of this divining power.
In fact, Faraday's memoirs on atmospheric magnetism lost much of their force perhaps too much through the important discovery of the relation of the variation of the declination to the number of the solar spots.
Before completing this brief sketch of some of the effects that Faraday's work has had on the practical arts and sciences, let us briefly examine the generating plants that are either in operation or construction at Niagara Falls.
In those days the Royal Institution published 'The Quarterly Journal of Science, the precursor of our own 'Proceedings. Faraday's first contribution to science appeared in that journal in 1816. It was an analysis of some caustic lime from Tuscany, which had been sent to Davy by the Duchess of Montrose. Between this period and 1818 various notes and short papers were published by Faraday.
In that view matter is not merely mutually penetrable; but each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the solar system, yet always retaining its own centre of force. It is the operation of a mind filled with thoughts of this profound, strange, and subtle character that we have to take into account in dealing with Faraday's later researches.
You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives 'gentle' and 'tender' would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano.
It was quite by accident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday's pastors and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered by Sir Humphry Davy.
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