576 HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



The laboratory work in which Faraday was first engaged was the 

 extraction of sugar from beetroot, and the preparation of sulphide of 

 carbon, and of the dangerously explosive compound called the chloride 

 of nitrogen. Davy and Faraday were both several times wounded by 

 explosions of this substance. A few months after Faraday's appoint- 

 ment, Sir H. Davy set out on a visit to the Continent, taking Faraday 

 with him as secretary and assistant in his experiments. This tour, 

 which extended over a year and a half, was of the greatest advantage 

 to Faraday, as he was brought into contact with the most distinguished 

 scientific men of the day. Although the Continent was then closed 

 to all English travellers, Sir Humphry and his party were allowed to 

 pass freely, and everywhere the great chemist was received with dis- 

 tinction by the scientific men of the cities he visited. It was during 

 his 'residence at various places abroad that Davy carried on his inves- 

 tigations into the properties of iodine, and on his return he entered 

 upon the researches on flame which ended in the invention of the 

 Davy Lamp. 



On his return from the Continent with Davy in 1815, Faraday was 

 again engaged at the Royal Institution as assistant in the laboratory 

 at a salary of thirty shillings per week. At this time Mr. Brande was 

 the Professor of Chemistry, Sir H. Davy being the Honorary Professor. 

 In the beginning of the following year Faraday delivered his first lecture 

 before the members of the " City Philosophical Society," of which he 

 had become a member while yet a bookseller's apprentice. This 

 was followed by five other lectures, all on chemical subjects. Other 

 chemical lectures to the same society were given by Faraday in the 

 following years. One delivered on the iQth of February, 1817, was 

 printed under the title, "On some Observations on the Means of 

 obtaining Knowledge, and on the Facilities afforded by the Consti- 

 tution of the City Philosophical Society." In 1817 Faraday also began 

 to publish papers in the scientific journals. 



In 1821, after Faraday had been engaged for eight years as labo- 

 ratory and lecture-room assistant in the Royal Institution, and as 

 private assistant to Davy, he was appointed Superintendent of the 

 Royal Institution. In the same year he married. This year is marked 

 also by his discovery of the rotations about magnets of wires conveying 

 currents. Among notes of subjects for future investigation, we find 

 entered in his book for this year the following : 



" Convert magnetism into electricity." 



To ultimately accomplish this was the great glory of Faraday's sci- 

 entific career. We see that the subject occupied his thoughts as early 

 as 1821, but the work was really entered upon ten years later, and 

 the account of it occupies the first part of his " Experimental Re- 

 searches," eight large folio volumes of manuscript, in which he has 

 detailed all his experiments, beginning in 1831 with paragraph num- 

 bered " i } " and continued paragraph by paragraph, numbered, until 



