PR A QMtiNTS OF SQlttNCtt. 



bf 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- 



