at insensible
distances.' Thus he broods over this new force, and looks at it from all
possible points of inspection. Experiment follows experiment, as thought
follows thought. He will not relinquish the subject as long as a hope
exists of throwing more light upon it. He knows full well the anomalous
nature of the conclusion to which his experiments lead him. But
experiment to him is final, and he will not shrink from the conclusion.
'This force,' he says, 'appears to me to be very strange and striking
in its character. It is not polar, for there is no attraction
or repulsion.' And then, as if startled by his own utterance, he
asks--'What is the nature of the mechanical force which turns the
crystal round, and makes it affect a magnet?'... 'I do not remember,' he
continues 'heretofore such a case of force as the present one, where a
body is brought into position only, without attraction or repulsion.'

Plucker, the celebrated geometer already mentioned, who pursued
experimental physics for many years of his life with singular devotion
and success, visited Faraday in those days, and repeated before him
his beautiful experiments on magneto-optic action. Faraday repeated and
verified Plucker's observations, and concluded, what he at first seemed
to doubt, that Plucker's results and magne-crystallic action had the
same origin.

At the end of his papers, when he takes a last look along the line of
research, and then turns his eyes to the future, utterances quite as
much emotional as scientific escape from Faraday. 'I cannot,' he says,
at the end of his first paper on magne-crystallic action, 'conclude
this series of researches without remarking how rapidly the knowledge of
molecular forces grows upon us, and how strikingly every investigation
tends to develop more and more their importance, and their extreme
attraction as an object of study. A few years ago magnetism was to us an
occult power, affecting only a few bodies, now it is found to influence
all bodies, and to possess the most intimate relations with electricity,
heat, chemical action, light, crystallization, and through it, with
the forces concerned in cohesion; and we may, in the present state of
things, well feel urged to continue in our labours, encouraged by the
hope of bringing it into a bond of union with gravity itself.'

Supplementary remarks

A brief space will, perhaps, be granted me here to state the further
progress of an investigation which inter