32 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



have done the same thing without growing up to he Faradays. But 

 with them it was play, with him it was work. Faraday himself, in 

 later years, attached considerable importance to the habit which he ac- 

 quired in early life of repeating, as far as he was able, the experiments 

 of which he read in Chemistry and Electricity. And when, after- 

 wards, the brilliant lecturer enchanted both young and old, he treated 

 his audiences as he had treated himself. He did not suppose them to 

 know, or require them to believe, in any physical law, however famil- 

 iar, unless he had shown it to them ; not even that a stone would drop 

 to the earth, without dropping it first before their eyes on to the floor 

 of the lecture-room. 



In 1812, Faraday was invited to the Royal Institution, to hear Sir 

 Humphry Davy lecture. He took notes at these lectures which 

 he afterwards sent to Davy, asking at the same time his assistance to 

 escape from trade and dedicate himself to science. Davy, who was 

 then at the zenith of his transcendent popularity, had the time and the 

 disposition to encourage the youthful aspirant, and in March, 1813, 

 Faraday became chemical assistant in the laboratory of the Royal 

 Institution. Mr. Gilbert Davies, who had himself detected the genius 

 of Davy in the obscure home of a Cornish carver at Penzance, has said 

 of the illustrious Davy, that the greatest of all his discoveries was the 

 discovery of Faraday. In a few months after Faraday's installation 

 at the Royal Institution, Davy started upon his prolonged visit to the 

 Continent, and Faraday accompanied him as secretary and chemical 

 assistant. His own modest merits were not altogether overshadowed 

 by the shining fame of his companion, and he formed friendships in 

 Paris, Geneva, and Italy which were only broken by death. 



Faraday began his career of original investigation in 1816, with a 

 successful analysis of a specimen of caustic lime from Tuscany. Since 

 that time, his contributions to science flowed on in a steady stream, 

 so broad and so deep that every province in Chemistry and Physics 

 has felt the reviving influence. In Acoustics, we recall his researches 

 on the sand-figures and lycopodium-heaps of vibrating plates, on musi- 

 cal flames and Trevelyan's experiment with a heated metal ; in Optics, 

 we are reminded of his papers on aerial perspective, on ocular decep- 

 tions produced by rotating wheels, on the relation of gold and other 

 metals to light, on the borosilicate of lead or heavy glass, and of his 

 services on the committee to which he was appointed in 1824, with 

 Herschel and Dolland, by the Royal Society, to suggest improvements 



