EPOCH OF DAVY AND FARADAY. 297 



Davy's assistant at the Institution ; and afterwards his successor. The 

 Institution which produced such researches as those of these two men, 

 may well be considered as a great school of exact and philosophical 

 chemistry. Mr. Faraday, from the beginning of his course of inquiry, 

 appears to have had the consciousness that he was engaged on a great 

 connected work. His Experimental Researches, which appeared in a 

 series of Memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions, are divided into 

 short paragraphs, numbered into a continued order from 1 up to 1160, 

 at the time at which I write ; 10 and destined, probably, to extend 

 much further. These paragraphs are connected by a very rigorous 

 method of investigation and reasoning which runs through the whole 

 body of them. Yet this unity of purpose was not at first obvious. 

 His first two Memoirs were upon subjects which we have already 

 treated of (B. xrii. c. 5 and c. 8), Voltaic Induction, and the evolution 

 of Electricity from Magnetism. His "Third Series" has also been 

 already referred to. Its object was, as a preparatory step towards 

 further investigation, to show the identity of voltaic and animal elec- 

 tricity with that of the electrical machine ; and as machine electricity 

 differs from other kinds in being successively in a state of tension and 

 explosion, instead of a continued current, Mr. Faraday succeeded in 

 identifying it with them, by causing the electrical discharge to pass 

 through a bad conductor into a discharging-train of vast extent ; 

 nothing less, indeed, than the whole fabric of the metallic gas-pipes 

 and water-pipes of London. In this Memoir ll it is easy to see already 

 traces of the general theoretical views at which he had arrived ; but 

 these are not expressly stated till his " Fifth Series ;" his intermediate 

 Fourth Series being occupied by another subsidiary labor on the con- 

 ditions of conduction. At length, however, in the Fifth Series, which 

 was read to the Royal Society in June, 1833, he approaches the the- 

 ory of electro-chemical decomposition. Most preceding theorists, and 

 Davy amongst the number, had referred this result to attractive poiv- 

 ers residing in the poles of the apparatus ; and had even pretended to 

 compare the intensity of this attraction at different distances from the 

 poles. By a number of singularly beautiful and skilful experiments, 

 Mr. Faraday shows that the phenomena can with no propriety be 



10 December, 1835. (At present, when I am revising the second edition ; 

 September, 1846, Dr. Faraday has recently published the "Twenty-first Series' 

 of his Researchcf, ending -with paragraph 2453.) 



11 Phil. Trans. 1833. 



