i o Annals of the Philosophical Club 



at the Royal Institution. Faraday took notes, and sent a copy 

 of them to the lecturer, asking his help in obtaining a less mechanical 

 employment. On Christmas Day, 1812, Davy engaged him as 

 laboratory attendant at twenty-five shillings a week (see section II.), 

 and was not long in discovering his exceptional talents, for he took 

 Faraday next summer as a sort of personal attendant to himself 

 and Lady Davy on a tour in France, Switzerland, and Italy, and 

 introduced him to his scientific friends. On their return Faraday 

 was again engaged at the Royal Institution, and began next year 

 to publish papers on science. In 1821 he took two important steps, 

 the one marrying, the other joining a small religious body called 

 Sandemanians. He began two years later a set of experiments 

 which suggested that all gases are the vapours of liquids with very 

 low boiling points, and in another two years he discovered benzol 

 and attempted to obtain a highly refractive optical glass. In the 

 later part of 1831 he began his great series of discoveries in magneto- 

 electricity, the incessant labour on which so affected his health 

 that he was obliged to take a long rest on the continent. Restored 

 to vigour by the Alpine air, he discovered the effect of magnetic 

 and electrical currents on the polarization of light, and then dia- 

 magnetism. Further investigations suggested doubts whether the 

 atom itself might not be capable of disruption, the demonstration 

 of which is one of the most important of recent advances. Faraday's 

 scientific position might have brought him wealth, but he sacrificed 

 that to the delight of discovery, till he died on Aug. 25th, 1867, 

 worthy of the eulogium, " that as water in crystallizing excludes 

 all foreign ingredients, however minute, so in the making of him 

 beauty and nobleness coalesced to the exclusion of everything 

 vulgar and low." 



PROFESSOR EDWARD FORBES, a first-rate naturalist, was a banker's 

 son, born in 1815 at Douglas in the Isle of Man. At the age of 

 sixteen he went to London as an art student, but finding little 

 encouragement, entered at Edinburgh University as a medical 

 student, where, however, he soon won distinction for his practical 

 knowledge of natural history, his keen insight, and his power of 

 generalization, so that these studies gradually drew him away 

 from medicine. After graduating in 1839 he went to the Levant 

 as naturalist on the survey-ship Beacon, where he dredged much, 

 especially on the coast of Asia Minor, and made archaeological 

 discoveries in Lycia. On returning to London in the autumn of 

 1842 he was elected Professor of Botany at King's College, and 

 two years later became Palaeontologist to the Geological Survey, 

 and a Fellow of the Royal Society when only thirty years old. 

 When the Survey moved to Jermyn Street, he became its Professor 

 of Applied Natural History, till in 1854 the Chair of Natural History 

 at Edinburgh took him from London. But his health, never strong, 



