246 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



19. 



Faraday. 



Green. 



Faraday, instead of being backed by a wealthy Academy 

 and ample assistance, had during all the years when hi& 

 great discoveries were being made, to keep alive, with an 

 income scarcely exceeding a hundred pounds a-year, an 

 institution which but for him the memory even of such 

 names as Eumford, Young, and Davy would not have 

 sufficed to preserve from utter ruin and collapse. 1 The 

 author of one of the most suggestive treatises in the 

 application of mathematics to physical phenomena, 

 George Green, published it in 1828 at Nottingham by 

 private subscription. Seventeen years later, William 

 Thomson (Lord Kelvin) tried in vain to procure a copy 



ideas than in comprehending those 

 of others who, like Berzelius, Mits- 

 cherlich, Laplace. LiebSg, and many 

 later, contributed to the confirma- 

 tion of the atomic theory. A good 

 account of this is given in Henry's 

 'Life of Dalton' (1854) and in 

 Kopp's ' Entwickelung der Chemie 

 in der neueren Zeit' (Miinchen, 

 1873). 



1 Michael Faraday (1791-1867), 

 though not a mathematician, intro- 

 duced into the science of electricity 

 those ideas which have since been 

 developed into a mathematical the- 

 ory approaching in completeness the 

 mathematics of the undulatory the- 

 ory of light. What the atomic the- 

 ory has done for chemistry, Fara- 

 day's lines of force are now doing for 

 electrical and magnetic phenomena. 

 Dalton, though unacquainted with 

 the higher mathematics of the 

 French school, had essentially a 

 mathematical or arithmetical mind. 

 Faraday's peculiar ideas on the 

 nature of electrical and magnetic 

 action, though supported by an ex- 

 perimental knowledge many times 

 surpassing in volume and accuracy 

 that of Dalton, did not find much 

 appreciation among his contem- 



poraries. They were much more 

 interested in his experimental re- 

 searches than in his theories. In 

 France andfltaly Faraday's eminence- 

 was recognised early. Already in 

 1823 he was elected member of the 

 Academies of Paris and Florence,, 

 almost before any society at home 

 had received him. " The circum- 

 stances under which Faraday's wort 

 was done were those of penury. 

 During a great part of the twenty- 

 six years the Royal Institution was- 

 kept alive by the lectures which 

 Faraday gave for it. ' We were 

 living,' as he once said to the 

 managers, ' on the parings of our 

 own skin.' He noted even the 

 expenditure of the farthings in 

 research and apparatus. He had 

 no grant from the Royal Society, 

 and throughout almost the whole 

 of his time the fixed income which, 

 the Institution could afford to give 

 him was 100 a-year, to which the 

 Fullerian professorship added nearly 

 100 more " (Bence Jones, ' Life and 

 Letters of Faraday,' London, 1870, 

 vol. ii. p. 344). See also Bence- 

 Jones, 'The Royal Institution,,' 

 p. 311. 



