se who ponder his
works seek to realise the object he set before him, not permitting
his occasional vagueness to interfere with their appreciation of his
speculations. We may see the ripples, and eddies, and vortices of a
flowing stream, without being able to resolve all these motions into
their constituent elements; and so it sometimes strikes me that Faraday
clearly saw the play of fluids and ethers and atoms, though his
previous training did not enable him to resolve what he saw into its
constituents, or describe it in a manner satisfactory to a mind versed
in mechanics. And then again occur, I confess, dark sayings, difficult
to be understood, which disturb my confidence in this conclusion. It
must, however, always be remembered that he works at the very boundaries
of our knowledge, and that his mind habitually dwells in the 'boundless
contiguity of shade' by which that knowledge is surrounded.

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. By his most ingenious device of a rapidly rotating mirror,
Wheatstone had proved that electricity required time to pass through
a wire, the current reaching the middle of the wire later than its
two ends. 'If,' says Faraday, 'the two ends of the wire in Professor
Wheatstone's experiments were immediately connected with two large
insulated metallic surfaces exposed to the air, so that the primary act
of induction, after making the contact for discharge, might be in part
removed from the internal portion of the wire at the first instance,
and disposed for the moment on its surface jointly with the air and
surrounding conductors, then I venture to anticipate that the middle
spark would be more retarded than before. And if those two plates were
the inner and outer coatings of a large jar or Leyden battery, then
the retardation of the spark would be much greater.' This was only
a prediction, for the experiment was not made.[2] Sixteen years
subsequently, however, the proper conditions came into play, and Faraday
was able to show that the observations of Werner Siemens, and Latimer
Clark, on subterraneous and submarine wires were illustrations, on a
grand scale, of the principle