LIFE AND LETTERS OF FARADAY 433 



tion of a medium. Others dened this; but none can 

 deny the profound and philosophic character of his lead- 

 ing thought. * The first volume of the Besearches contains 

 all the papers here referred to. 



Faraday had heard it stated that henceforth physical 

 discoveries would be made solely by the aid of mathemat- 

 ics; that we had our data, and needed only to work de- 

 ductively. Statements of a similar character crop out 

 from time to time in our day. They arise from an im- 

 perfect acquaintance with the nature, present condition, 

 and prospective vastness of the field of physical inquiry. 

 The tendency of natural science doubtless is to bring all 

 physical phenomena under the dominion of mechanical 

 laws; to give them, in other words, mathematical expres- 

 sion. But our approach to this result is asymptotic; and 

 for ages to come — possibly for all the ages of the human 

 race — Nature will find room for both the philosophical ex- 

 perimenter and the mathematician. Faraday entered his 

 protest against the foregoing statement by labelling his 

 investigations "Experimental Besearches in Electricity." 

 They were completed in 1854, and three volumes of them 

 have been published. For the sake of reference, he num- 

 bered every paragraph, the last number being 8,862. In 

 1859 he collected and published [a. fourth volume of pa- 

 pers, under the title, ** Experimental Besearches in Chem- 

 istry and Physics." Thus did this apostle of experiment 

 illustrate its power and magnify his office. 



The second volume of the Besearches embraces mem- 



* In a very remarkable paper published in Poggendorff*s **Annalen" for 

 1857, Werner Siemens accepts and develops Faraday's theory of Molecular 

 Induction. 



Science— V — 19 



