HENRY AND FARADAY. -j-j 



or rather those powers of the mind which are capable of penetrating 

 into all things within our reach and knowledge, and of distinguishing 

 their essential differences. These are no other than invention and 

 judgment ; and they are both called by the collective name of genius, 

 as they are of those gifts of nature which we bring with us into the 

 world. Concerning each of which, many seem to have fallen into very 

 great errors ; for by invention, I believe, is generally understood a 

 creative faculty, which would indeed prove most romance writers to 

 have the highest pretensions to it ; whereas by invention is meant no 

 more (and so the word signifies) than discovery or finding out ; or, to 

 explain it at large, a quick and sagacious penetration into the true 

 essence of all the objects of our contemplation. This, I think, can 

 rarely exist without the concomitancy of judgment, for how we can " 

 be said to have discovered the true essence of two things, without dis- 

 cerning their difference, seems to me hard to conceive. Now, this last 

 is the undisputed province of judgment ; and yet some few men of wit 

 have agreed with all the dull fellows in the world in representing 

 these two to have been seldom or never the property of one and the 

 same person." 



My own judgment, if of any value, would rank the ability of 

 Henry I do not say his achievements a little below that of Faraday. 

 Indeed, their lives and their manners of working were strangely alike. 

 Each started in life with moral and benevolent habits, well developed 

 and healthy bodies, quick and accurate perceptions, calm judgment 

 and self-reliance, tempered with modesty and good manners a good 

 ground, surely, in which to plant the germs of the scientific life. Far- 

 aday was an apprentice to a bookbinder. Henry served in the same 

 capacity under a silversmith. Each, endowed with a lively imagina- 

 tion, was in his younger days fond of romance and the drama ; and, 

 by a singular similarity of accidents, each had had his attention turned 

 to science by a book which chance threw in his way. This work, in 

 the case of Faraday, was Mrs. Marcet's " Conversations on Chemis- 

 try," and the book which influenced Henry's career was Gregory's 

 " Lectures on Experimental Philosophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry.'* 

 Of Mrs. Marcet's book Faraday thus writes : 



My DEAR Friend : Tour subject interested me deeply every way^ for Mrs. 

 Marcet was a good friend to me, as she must have been to many of the human 

 race. I entered the shop of a bookseller and bookbinder at the age of thirteen, 

 in the year 1804, remaining there eight years, and during the chief part of the 

 time bound books. Now, it was in those books, in the hours after work, that I 

 found the beginning of my philosophy. There were two that especially helped 

 me, the "Encyclopajdia Britannica," from which I gained my first notions of 

 electricity, and Mrs. Marcet's " Conversations on Chemistry," which gave me 

 my foundation in that science. 



Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a preco- 

 cious person. I was a lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the " Ara- 

 bian Nights "as easily as in the "Encyclopaedia." But facts were important 



