FARADAY. 



him aright with the other great men among whom we shall have to place 



him. 



Every great man of the first rank is unique. Each has his own office and 

 his own place in the historic procession of the sages. That office did not exist 

 even in the imagination, till he came to fill it, and none can succeed to his 

 place when he has passed away. Others may gain distinction by adapting the 

 exposition of science to the varying language of each generation of students, but 

 their true function is not so much didactic as pa3dagogic not to teach the use 

 of phrases which enable us to persuade ourselves that we understand a science, 

 but to bring the student into living contact with the two main sources of 

 mental growth, the fathers of the sciences, for whose personal influence over 

 the opening mind there is no substitute, and the material things to which 

 their labours first gave a meaning. 



Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of 

 electro-magnetism which takes in at one view, all the phenomena which former 

 inquirers had studied separately, besides those which Faraday himself discovered 

 by following the guidance of those convictions, which he had already obtained, 

 of the unity of the whole science. 



Before him came the discovery of most of the fundamental phenomena, the 

 electric and magnetic attractions and repulsions, the electric current and its 

 effects. Then came Cavendish, Coulomb, and Poisson, who by following the 

 path pointed out by Newton, and making the forces which act between bodies 

 the principal object of their study, founded the mathematical theories of electric 

 and magnetic forces. Then Orsted discovered the cardinal fact of electro-magnetic 

 force, and Ampere investigated the mathematical laws of the mechanical action 

 between electric currents. 



Thus the field of electro-magnetic Science was already very large when 

 Faraday first entered upon his public career. It was so large that to take in 

 at one view all its departments required a stretch of thought for which a 

 special preparation was necessary. Accordingly, we find Faraday endeavouring 

 in the first place to obtain, from each of the known sources of electric action, 

 all the phenomena which any one of them was able to exhibit. Having thus 

 established the unity of nature of all electric manifestations, his next aim was 

 to form a conception of electrification, or electric action, which would embrace 

 them all. For this purpose it was necessary that he should begin by getting 

 rid of those parasitical ideas, which are so apt to cling to every scientific term, 



