FARADAY.*
MATERIALS for a picture of Faraday as a man and as a philoso-
pher exist, but the picture itself has not yet been composed. Dr. Tyndall has, indeed, given us in a compact and attractive form an epitome of the chief discoveries of Faraday, and has spoken in sympathetic and appreciative terms of the force and beauty of his character. Dr. Bence Jones, too, has faithfully edited a large number of his letters, together with numerous extracts from his journals, note-books, and published papers. From these two works, after much curtailment of the latter, a volume might be prepared which should present a complete and continuous narra- tive of Faraday's life and labours. But although Dr. Bence Jones's book must be looked upon as rather tedious and frag- mentary, it possesses the great merit of being an ample store- house of facts and of Faraday's own expressions and views. We will endeavour to trace in the briefest possible outline some in- cidents in the career and some features of the character and powers of one of the greatest discoverers of this or any age.
Our knowledge of the ancestry of Faraday is meagre. His great-grandfather appears to have been one " Richard ffaraday," of Keasden, near Clapham, Yorkshire, a "stonemason, tiler, and Separatist." Most of his descendants occupied humble positions— one of his grandsons, James Faraday, was a blacksmith. Of this James, the third child, born in 1791, was Michael Faraday. Ile was first of all a newspaper-boy, and then apprentice to a bookbinder.
He not only bound books, but read them. Mrs. Marcet's
Conversations in Chemistry and the articles on electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica gave him souse knowledge of the facts of natural science, and stimulated him to further acquisition by reading, by discussion, and above all, by experiment. Faraday's elder brother helped him to learn, by paying for his admission to the scientific lectures of a Mr. Tatum. Faraday tried, as far as his few spare pence allowed him, to construct little pieces of philosophical apparatus for himself, and to repeat the experiments he had witnessed. lie began a scientific common-place book, which he called "The Philosophical Miscellany," and also a corre- spondence with one Benjamin Abbott, a Quaker clerk. This correspondence is printed almost at full length by Dr. Bence Jones. It gives many interesting glimpses of Faraday's life, and many characteristic traits of his manner and mode of thought. It is full of sound sense and good advice, and shows a propriety of diction and a command of language which prove how this poor but noble apprentice boy of twenty had magnified his opportunities, how minutely and thoroughly he had observed, and how much he had thought. These letters are, however, a little wearisome to read, in spite of the circumstances under which they were written and the subsequent career of the writer. Ilere and there the childlike simplicity and truthfulness of Faraday and his playful nese of spirit lend a special charm to these letters and journals,—as, for instance, when he begins a letter, " Tuesday morning, half-past six o'clock, and a fine morning," or wishes " to purchase, at a cheap rate, some of our modern gents' spare hours, nay, days ;" amid thinks " it would be a good bargain both for them and Inc." Again, on one occasion, when he received a letter concerning some new experiment, he says he was paper-hanging at the time, and such a change of thought occurred, such " a con- cussion, confusion, conglomeration, that away went clothes, shears, paper, paste, and brush." Faraday tried hard to escape from the house where his spirit was in bondage. lie wrote to Sir Joseph Banks with no result, but was kindly treated by Sir Humphry Davy, to whom he had been introduced by Mr. Dance, a member of the Royal Institution. Faraday easily convinced Davy not only of his industry and zeal, but, to some extent, at all events, of his powers ; and Davy, though be told the bookbinder's journeyman that "Science was a harsh mistress, and, in a pecuniary point of view, but poorly rewarded her votaries," found Faraday ready, after all, to accept the post of his assistant.
Faraday's career at the Royal Institution began on an allowance
of 25s. a week, with two rooms at the top of the house. Ile was assistant to a great chemist who had made but five years before the most brilliant discovery of the day, namely, that of the metallic bases of the alkalies. Faraday helped Davy, and he also worked on his own account. He was faithful, laborious, and happy. Then • 1. The Life and Letters of Faraday. By Dr. Bence Jones, Secretary to the Royal Institution. London : Longman'. 1870.
2. Faraday ar a Discoverer. By J. Tyndall. 2nd Edition. Longmans. 1870. he travelled on the Continent for more than a year with Davy. Together they examined the newly discovered iodine at Paris, and made the acquaintance of Ampere, Clement, and Desormes. While at Genoa they experimented on the electric torpedo, and at Florence burnt diamonds with the Grand Duke's lens. A scientific tour so full of noteworthy incident and discoveries of interest seems strange to the chemists of to-day. But trained chemists were rare then, and many a substance was waiting to be identified, many a phenomenon waiting to be explained by the singular penetration of Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday's tour was not altogether pleasant, however. Lady Davy had a temper, and showed it ; while on one occasion Sir Humphry himself was snobbish enough to object to sitting down at the table of De la hive with Faraday, who had kindly undertaken, for a time, some of the duties of a valet. Fara- day, after all, learnt much from his tour, studied French and Italian, and seems to have enjoyed the novelty of scene and situa- tion. Ile gives an amusing description of the native pigs at Drieux. "You judge them," he says, "to be greyhounds in the distance, but when you approach them you are compelled to acknowledge them to be pigs." He kills quails on the Geneva plains, pulls trout and grayling from the Rhone, and goes in a domino to a mask ball.
On his return to England, Faraday resumed his position at the Royal Institution. When about twenty-three, he began lecturing and writing. He had long known how to speak and lecture, and his views on this subject were fully and admirably expressed iu a letter to his friend Abbott, written when Faraday was only twenty-one. We must not linger on this period of his career, since it was not as assistant to a chemist nor as a chemist that his great discoveries and great reputation were made. When Faraday was forty, his real period of work arrived with the commencement of his electrical researches. Ten years before this he married " Sarah, the third daughter of Mr. Barnard, of Paternoster Row, an elder of the Sandemanian Church." In his love-making he showed himself tender and true, and we have ample reason to know that his married life was altogether happy. His pleasures were few and simple : he could unbend himself in his home in kindly sympathy with the young, or sprightly conversation with select friends of maturer years. But nothing abated his zeal for original work, and, with occasional rests, for thirty years longer he questioned Nature with perseverance, adroitness, and success. Faraday delighted in experiment. An old experiment was to him very often a spring of new knowledge. His imaginative faculty was very strong, though the mathematical side of his mind was scarcely developed at all. He imagined and foresaw, and then a series of exquisitely devised experiments brought his speculations to the test. His greatest discoveries were those of magneto- electricity and the influence of magnetism on light. But he made other laborious researches, and numerous discoveries both in che- mistry and physics. Some of them are already fruitful in practical applications of the first importance. He gave information con- tinually to all who asked him. Amongst the letters he received and answered was one from the present Emperor of the French, written from the fortress of Ham on May 23, 1843, in which the Prince characteristically enough asks the philosopher whether a spark under water could be made to set fire to powder !
Now and then Faraday overworked himself, and was obliged to leave his laboratory and seek rest in the country. Here the dormant poetry of his soul came out. The grander and more active phenomena of nature offered a special delight to him. His accounts of storms on Cader Idris and the lake of Than are at once eloquent and truthful. He loved animals, and the notes on their ways and intelligence recorded in his journals of tours are touched with peculiar tenderness.
Faraday's grand discoveries were the chief events in his life. He was engaged in far fewer disputes than most scientific men. Davy became, indeed, jealous of him, and opposed his election into the Royal Society ; an unjust charge of acting unfairly towards Wollaston was made against him ; and he was insulted by Lord Melbourne in the matter of a pension. But his character and conduct were above reproach, and he won from all ranks and countries esteem as well as renown. Towards the close of his life his memory began to fail, and he resigned in 1861, when seventy years of age, a part of his duties at the Royal Institution. His letter is given by Dr. Bence Jones, and shows very fully Faraday's appreciation of the consideration he had received, and his intense desire to do what was right. In 1865 he spoke of himself as " just waiting." He died peacefully, August 25, 1867, in his seventy- sixth year. He desired to be buried " in the simplest earthly place," and to have " a gravestone of the most ordinary kind, and a plain, simple funeral, attended by none but his relations."
Tyndall tells us how Faraday showed him one day the bench where he worked as a bookbinder's apprentice ; where he played at marbles in Spanish Place, and "minded" his little sister in Manchester Square. Dr. Bence Jones gives us views of Jacob's Well Mews and Mr. Riebau's shop in Blandford Street, both early homes of Faraday. The inevitable relic-worship has begun.
We cannot pass over in silence the religious life of a man like Faraday. When lie was fifty-three, he wrote, "There is no philo- sophy in my religion. I am of a very small and despised sect of Christians, known, if known at all, as Sandemanians." Science and religion were said by Faraday to be parallels ; they never touched. 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 early in the last century. He preached as an elder of his small Church. The present reviewer 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 tithe of that real power with which he, two days before, had lectured on science. Texts were 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 very wearisome, and the attention of the small congregation languid in the extreme. The ordinary members of it must have fidgeted a good deal under their ministers, for the high box-pews were worn into great holes below by the feet of generations of impatient listeners! A service conducted by eight ministers, five in a lower pulpit, and three in an upper, and consisting of several long Scotch psalms, long Scrip- ture readings, long prayers, and a long sermon, is thus evidently not calculated to rivet the attention even of the followers of Glas and Sandeman.
However curious and unintelligent his form of faith and his con- victions as to its origin and place may seem, Faraday did, after all, carry his religion into his daily life, and even, though uncon- sciously, into his philosophy. He was honest, manly, noble; full of tender kindness and care ; he pressed every power of his intel- lect and every affection of his soul 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."
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