MICHAEL FARADAY-HIS LIFIE'AND WORKS. 



B\ PROFESSOR A. DE LA RIVE.* 



Science has just lost one c^ its most eminent and faithful representatives. 

 Faraday died on Sunda3^ the 25th of August, 1867, at Hampton Court. He 

 was born on the 24th of September, 1791, at Newington Butts, near London. 

 In 1804, at the age of 13, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, in whose work- 

 shop he remained eight years. So many books passed through his hands that 

 he could not resist the temptation of opening and reading some of them. 

 These readings, perfonned in the evenings after the work of the day was 

 finished, gave him a taste for study, and in particular for that of the sciences. 

 The Encyclopmlia Britannica first of all introduced him to some notions of elec- 

 tricity ; and it was afterwards, from the Avorks of Mrs. Marcet, that he derived 

 his first knowledge of chemistry. His labors received their permanent direc- 

 tion from this opening ; their essential objects Avere electricity and chemistry. 



'' Do not fancy," he said to me in a letter t of the 2d of October, 1858, in 

 which he gives me these details, " that I was a profound thinker or a precocious 

 child ; I had merely a good deal of life and imagination, and the tales of the 

 Thousand and One Nights pleased me as much as the Encyclopccdia Britannica. 

 ' But what saved me was the importance I early attached to facts. In reading 

 Mrs. Marcet's book on chemistry, I took care to prove every assertion by the 

 little experiments which I made as far as my means permitted ; and the enjoy- 

 ment which I found in thus verifying the exactitude of the facts contributed 

 essentially to give me a taste for chemical knowledge. You may therefore 

 easily imagine the pleasure I experienced when I subsequently made the per- 

 sonal acquaintance of Mrs. Marcet, and how delighted I was when my thoughts 

 went backward to contemplate in her at once the past and the present. When- 

 ever I presented her with a copy of my memoirs I took care to add that I sent 

 them to her as a testimony of my gratitude to my first instructress." 



** I have the same sentiments towards the memory of your own father," adds 

 Faradaj^, '^ for he was, I may say, the first who encouraged and sustained me, 

 first at Geneva, Avhen I had the pleasure of seeing him there, and afterwards 

 by the correspondence which I regularly maintained with him." 



Faraday here alludes to a journey in which he accompanied Davy to Geneva 

 in 1814, and in which, during a stay which he made with his illustrious master 

 at my father's, the latter quickly discerned the merits of the young assistant, 

 and formed relations with him which were interrupted only by death. At the 

 time when he travelled with Davy, Faraday was his assistant at the Royal 

 Institution in London ; and I must say that he has more than once expressed 

 to me, both by letter and viva voce, his thankfulness to the eminent chemist 

 who had admitted him to one of his courses, and consented, after running 

 through the notes of this course prepared by the young pupil, to take him for 

 his assistant. 



After the journey just referred to, Faraday, with the exception of rare and 



* Translated from the Biblioth^que Universelle, October 25, 1867, Arch, des ScL, pp. 131- 

 176. 



t This letter was addressed to me on the occasion of the death of Mrs. Marcet, and the 

 notice which I was about to publish on this distinguished woman. (See Bibl. Univ., nouvelle 

 «erie, 1858, vol. iii.) 



