f the present day.

While I write, the volumes of the Life of Faraday by Dr. Bence Jones
have reached my hands. To them the reader must refer for an account of
Faraday's private relations. A hasty glance at the work shows me that
the reverent devotion of the biographer has turned to admirable account
the materials at his command.

The work of Dr. Bence Jones enables me to correct a statement regarding
Wollaston's and Faraday's respective relations to the discovery of
Magnetic Rotation. Wollaston's idea was to make the wire carrying a
current rotate round its own axis: an idea afterwards realised by the
celebrated Ampere. Faraday's discovery was to make the wire carrying the
current revolve round the pole of a magnet and the reverse.

John Tyndall. Royal Institution: December, 1869.

FARADAY AS A DISCOVERER.

Chapter 1.

Parentage: introduction to the royal institution: earliest
experiments: first royal society paper: marriage.

It has been thought desirable to give you and the world some image
of MICHAEL FARADAY, as a scientific investigator and discoverer. The
attempt to respond to this desire has been to me a labour of difficulty,
if also a labour of love. For however well acquainted I may be with the
researches and discoveries of that great master--however numerous the
illustrations which occur to me of the loftiness of Faraday's character
and the beauty of his life--still to grasp him and his researches as a
whole; to seize upon the ideas which guided him, and connected them; to
gain entrance into that strong and active brain, and read from it the
riddle of the world--this is a work not easy of performance, and all but
impossible amid the distraction of duties of another kind. That I should
at one period or another speak to you regarding Faraday and his work is
natural, if not inevitable; but I did not expect to be called upon to
speak so soon. Still the bare suggestion that this is the fit and proper
time for speech sent me immediately to my task: from it I have returned
with such results as I could gather, and also with the wish that those
results were more worthy than they are of the greatness of my theme.

It is not my intention to lay before you a life of Faraday in the
ordinary acceptation of the term. The duty I have to perform is to give
you some notion of what he has done in the world; dwelling incidentally
on the spirit in which his work was executed, and introducing such
per