2i4 MICHAEL FAKADAY-— HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 



shows traces of the school from which he came, especially in the choice of the 

 subjects of which he treats ; but he does not blindly follow either the method 

 or the steps of his master, and, soon quitting the beaten track, he strikes out a 

 path for himself. What is this path ? I shall be asked. This is not easy to 

 say ; but I will nevertheless attempt it. 



At the commencement of the present century, thanks to the important works 

 of which it had been the subject, the science of physics had acquired a character 

 of precision and clearness which seemed almost to make of it a mathematical 

 science. The fine treatise, in four volumes, on Experimental and Mathematical 

 Physics, published in 1816 by M. Biot, gives the most correct and conqilete idea 

 of the point at which this science had arrived. To the confusion which still 

 reigned in the middle of the eighteenth century between the various depart- 

 ments of the science, to the ignorance which then still prevailed upon a great 

 number of these departments, succeeded a clear and substantial analysis of all 

 the phenomena, brought under simple and rigorous laws. Heat, light, elec- 

 tricity, and magnetism were regarded in it as so many distinct agents, having 

 their special properties and obeying their own laws. Calculation was admirably 

 fitted to these clear and precise conceptions ; hence wo find it greatly used, as 

 witness the very title of M. Blot's treatise. 



The great discovery of CErsted, (in 1820,) upon the relations existing between 

 electricity and magnetism, began to diminish confidence in this mode of con- 

 sidering the phenomena, a confidence which was already a good deal shaken by 

 the researches of Fresnel and Arago upon light. The breach once opened, the 

 fortress was soon entered ; and among the most intrepid assailants Faraday 

 figures in the front rank. By his researches on the condensation of gases, he 

 shows that there is nothing absolute in the laws of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac 

 and in the distinction so generally accepted between vapors aiid permanent 

 gases. By his investigations upon voltaic electricity, he establishes between 

 chemical afiinity and the production of electricity a relation so intimate that it 

 seems as if the one was only a form of the other. By his discovery of induc- 

 tion, he brings in mechanical movement as an important element in the produc- 

 tion of electrical phenomena. By his experiments on the iniluence of the mag- 

 net and of electricity on polarized light, and by those which were the conse- 

 quence of it, lie opens to science a new path which no one had foreseen. He 

 succeeds thus in establishing between the natural agents which wo name light, 

 heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and molecular attraction such 

 intimate relations, such a connection, that it is impossible not to think that we 

 shall one day succeed in demonstrating that they are only different forms of the 

 same agent. No doubt he is not the only one that has followed this path. 

 Many others have brought in their contingent to this work of demolition and 

 reconstruction 5 but he was one of the first, most active, and most persevering. 

 Therefore his works, I have no doubt, will always be regarded as corner-stones 

 in the new edifice which we are now endeavoring to construct. 



I designedly say, ?r/i/cA w'C rtre endeavoring to const ntcf ; for we must care- 

 fully avoid thinking that it is already constructed. Since the fine discovery of 

 the mechanical equivalent of heat, it seems as if everything had been said and 

 everything were easily explained by means simply of a ponderable matter, an 

 imponderable rether, and a mechanical impulse. Vulgarizers of science, more 

 anxious to produce an effect than to remain faithful to scientific truth, proclaim 

 a molecular system of the world destined to foiTn a pendant to the Mccanique 

 Celeste of Laplace. According to them, nothing is more simple, nothing clearer; 

 attraction itself, which has been the object of the study of so many superior 

 minds, is merely the effect of an inq^ulse easy to understand. A dangerous 

 illusion ! which, if it succeeded in propagating itself, would be as fatal to the 

 true progress of science as opposed to its useful diffusion ; for it is especially 

 upon those who take to themselves the high mission of popularizing science 



