OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : JUNE 9, 1868. 37 



Hunt charges. He prized the recognition of academies and universities, 

 but not the insignia of rank. Without leisure for fashionable society, 

 he enjoyed preaching to the humble sect of Christians to which he be- 

 longed as much as lecturing before princes and nobles, either of birth 

 or of intellect, at the Royal Institution. 



It is little to say of such a man that he was made a Fellow of the 

 Royal Society of London in 1824, a Corresponding Member of the 

 French Academy of Sciences in 1823, a Foreign Associate of this 

 Academy in 1844; that his name was eagerly sought to adorn the list 

 of honor of all other Academies in Europe and America ; that he re- 

 ceived from the Royal Society of London the Rumford, Copley, and 

 Royal medals ; that his simple life was made independent by a pension 

 of £300, conferred upon him in 1835 ; that Napoleon the exile was in- 

 structed by his lectures, and Napoleon the Emperor acknowledged the 

 obligation by naming him Commander of the Legion of Honor. 



It is much to say of him that he declined all honors and rewards 

 which were foreign to his scientific character ; that, when he might 

 have amassed a fortune of £ 150,000 by applying old discoveries to 

 commercial uses, he preferred to concentrate his whole mind on the 

 discovery of new truth, dying poor, and leaving a widow dependent on 

 a small pension, which, in noble imitation of his example, she refused 

 to have increased ; that he ruled a strong nature so as to be always 

 gentle, and only impatient of those who unnecessarily wasted his time ; 

 that he was as much exalted above others in modesty as in intellectual 

 greatness ; that he made science honorable and attractive ; that he 

 ruled with an imperial sway the hearts no less than the intellects of 

 his generation, and that his final departure from the laboratory in the 

 Royal Institution of Great Britain on the 20th of June, 1862, was 

 followed by one universal pang of grief throughout the world of 

 science. 



Long and loudly and perseveringly had Faraday knocked at the 

 secret gates of nature, and most encouraging were the responses which, 

 from time to time, he had received. Nevertheless, he finds it in his 

 heart to say : " I have never seen anything incompatible between those 

 things of man which can be known by the spirit of man which is 

 within him and those higher things concerning his future which he 

 cannot know by that spirit." 



Faraday, with a wise precaution, which consulted the convenience 

 of others no less than his own reputation, made a timely collection of 



