APPENDIX II. 257 



It is hoped that the present Symposium will be no less successful than 

 previous ones. Many Members and others at home and abroad have 

 expressed their thanks for the useful work done by our Society. We 

 have also tried to give a ]iel]iino liand and encouragement to the 

 younger men in our midst. This lias been one of the chief objects 

 we have always had specially in mind. Let our motto be " Thorough- 

 ness," and we shall continue to flourish and do still better work in 

 the future. 



The Woi'h of Michael Faraday. — Turning now for a moment to 

 Michael Faraday, from whom our Society takes its name, I will 

 a little later on refer to one of the descriptions of the Great Scientist, 

 by Professor John Tyndall, F.K.S., in his lecture before the Koyal 

 Institution in January, 1863, on " Faraday as a Discoverer." 



De la Rive, the well-known French Scientist in his " Notice on 

 Faraday's Life and Work," Archives des Sciences de la Bibliothcque 

 Universelle, October, 1867, stated that the number of Faraday's 

 Memoirs from 1820 to 1855, all of these important, was almost in- 

 credible. 



Faraday w^as born at Newington Butts on the 22nd September, 

 1791, aiid finally passed away at Hampton Court on the 25th 

 August, 1867. 



Tyndall said that it seemed desirable to give the world some 

 image of Michael Faraday as a scientific investigator and discoverer. 

 He regarded the attempt to respond to this desire, whilst a labour of 

 difficulty in adequately jjresenting a history of this great man, as also 

 a labour of love. However well acquainted he might be with the 

 researches and discoveries of the great mastei' — however numerous 

 the illustrations which occur to him of the loftiness of Faraday's 

 character and the beauty of his life — still to grasp him and his re- 

 searches as a whole ; to seize upon the ideas which guided him and 

 connect them ; to gain entrance into that strong and active brain 

 and read from it the riddle of the world — was a work not easy of 

 performance. As he was a believer in the general truth of the doctrine 

 of hereditary transmission, Tyndall, w^ho shared the opinion of Carlyle 

 that a really able man never proceeded from entirely stupid parents — 

 said that he once used the privilege of his intimacy with Faraday to 

 ask him whether his parents showed any signs of unusual ability. He 

 could remember none. His father was a great sufferer during the later 

 years of his life, and this might have masked whatever intellectual 

 power he possessed. When thirteen years old, that is to say in 1804, 

 Faraday was apprenticed to a book-binder in Blandford Street, 

 Manchester Square ; here he spent eight years of his life, after whi(h 

 he worked as a journeyman elsewhere. 



Faraday was only 22 years of age when he obtained a position in 

 the Royal Institution. His first contribution to Science appeared 

 in the Journal of the Royal Institution in 1816, that is, in the publica- 

 tion known as the " Quarterly Journal of Science." I thought it might 

 be of interest to give the following summaries by Tyndall of (1) 

 Researches by Faraday, and (2) Discoveries by Faraday :-^ 



