320 FSA GMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
of letters and extracts published in the volumes before us. 
I will not call the labors of the biographer final. So great 
a character will challenge reconstruction. In the coming 
time some sympathetic spirit, with the requisite strength, 
knowledge, and solvent power, will, I doubt not, render 
these materials plastic, give them more perfect organic 
form, and send through them, with less of interruption, 
the currents of Faraday's life. " He was too good a man," 
writes his present biographer, "for me to estimate rightly, 
and too great a philosopher for me to understand 
thoroughly." That may be: but the reverent affection to 
which we owe the discovery, selection, and arrangement of 
the materials here placed before us, is probably a surer 
guide than mere literary skill. The task of the artist who 
may wish in future times to reproduce the real though 
unobtrusive grandeur, the purity, beauty, and childlike 
simplicity of him whom we have lost, will find his chief 
treasury already provided for him by Dr. Bence Jones' 
labor of love. 
CHAPTER XIX. 
THE COPLEY MEDALIST OF 1870. 
THIRTY years ago Electro-magnetism was looked to as a 
motive power, which might possibly compete with steam. 
In the centers of industry, such as Manchester, attempts to 
investigate and apply this power were numerous. This is 
shown by the scientific literature of the time. Among 
others Mr. James Prescot Joule, a resident of Manchester, 
took up the subject, and, in a series of papers published in 
Sturgeon's " Annals of Electricity" between 1839 and 1841, 
described various attempts at the construction and per- 
fection of electro-magnetic engines. The spirit in which 
Mr. Joule pursued these inquiries is revealed in the fol- 
lowing extract: "I am particularly anxious," he says, "to 
communicate any new arrangement in order, if possible, to 
forestall the monopolizing designs of those who seem to 
regard this most interesting subject merely in the light of 
pecuniary speculation." He was naturally led to investi- 
gate the laws of electro-magnetic attractions, and in 1840 
he announced the important principle that the attractive 
force exerted by two electro-magnets, or by an electro- 
