onductor; it is the best radiator. Silver, among solids, is
the best conductor; it is the worst radiator. The excellent
researches of MM. de la Provostaye and Desains furnish a striking
illustration of what I am inclined to regard as a natural law--that
those atoms which transfer the greatest amount of motion to the
aether, or, in other words, radiate most powerfully, are the least
competent to communicate motion to each other, or, in other words, to
propagate by conduction readily.

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XVIII. LIFE, AND LETTERS OF FARADAY.

1870.

UNDERTAKEN and executed in a reverent and loving spirit, the work of
Dr. Bence Jones makes Faraday the virtual writer of his own life.
Everybody now knows the story of the philosopher's birth; that his
father was a smith; that he was born at Newington Butts in 1791; that
he ran along the London pavements, a bright-eyed errand boy, with a
load of brown curls upon his head and a packet of newspapers under his
arm; that the lad's master was a bookseller and bookbinder--a kindly
man, who became attached to the little fellow, and in due time made
him his apprentice without fee; that during his apprenticeship he
found his appetite for knowledge provoked and strengthened by the
books he stitched and covered. Thus he grew in wisdom and stature to
his year of legal manhood, when he appears in the volumes before us as
a writer of letters, which reveal his occupation, acquirements, and
tone of mind. His correspondent was Mr. Abbott, a member of the
Society of Friends, who, with a forecast of his correspondent's
greatness, preserved his letters and produced them at the proper time.

In later years Faraday always carried in his pocket a blank card, on
which he jotted down in pencil his thoughts and memoranda. He made
his notes in the laboratory, in the theatre, and in the streets. This
distrust of his memory reveals itself in his first letter to Abbot. To
a proposition that no new enquiry should be started between them
before the old one had been exhaustively discussed, Faraday objects.
'Your notion,' he says, 'I can hardly allow, for the following
reason: ideas and thoughts spring up in my mind which are irrevocably
lost for want of noting at the time.' Gentle as he seemed, he wished
to have his own way, and he had it throughout his life. Differences
of opinion sometimes arose between the two friends, and then they
resolutely faced each other. 'I accept your offer to figh