gen adhering to the other electrode swells
into large bubbles, which rise in much slower succession; but when the
current is reversed, the hydrogen is liberated upon the cleansed wire,
and then its bubbles also become small.

Footnotes to Chapter 5

[1] Buff finds the quantity of electricity associated with
one milligramme of hydrogen in water to be equal to 45,480
charges of a Leyden jar, with a height of 480 millimetres,
and a diameter of 160 millimetres. Weber and Kohlrausch
have calculated that, if the quantity of electricity
associated with one milligramme of hydrogen in water were
diffused over a cloud at a height of 1000 metres above the
earth, it would exert upon an equal quantity of the opposite
electricity at the earth's surface an attractive force of
2,268,000 kilogrammes. (Electrolytische Maasbestimmungen,
1856, p. 262.)

[2] Faraday, sa Vie et ses Travaux, p. 20.

Chapter 6.

Laws of electro-chemical decomposition.

In our conceptions and reasonings regarding the forces of nature,
we perpetually make use of symbols which, when they possess a high
representative value, we dignify with the name of theories. Thus,
prompted by certain analogies, we ascribe electrical phenomena to the
action of a peculiar fluid, sometimes flowing, sometimes at rest. Such
conceptions have their advantages and their disadvantages; they afford
peaceful lodging to the intellect for a time, but they also circumscribe
it, and by-and-by, when the mind has grown too large for its lodging, it
often finds difficulty in breaking down the walls of what has become its
prison instead of its home.[1]

No man ever felt this tyranny of symbols more deeply than Faraday, and
no man was ever more assiduous than he to liberate himself from them,
and the terms which suggested them. Calling Dr. Whewell to his aid
in 1833, he endeavoured to displace by others all terms tainted by
a foregone conclusion. His paper on Electro-chemical Decomposition,
received by the Royal Society on January 9, 1834, opens with the
proposal of a new terminology. He would avoid the word 'current' if he
could.[2] He does abandon the word 'poles' as applied to the ends of
a decomposing cell, because it suggests the idea of attraction,
substituting for it the perfectly natural term Electrodes. He applied
the term Electrolyte to every substance which can be decomposed by the
current, and the act o