308 FRA GMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



her capability to return it with adequate force. But they 

 met again and again, and at each successive meeting he 

 found his heaven clearer, until at length he was able tosay, 

 " Not a moment's alloy of this evening's happiness occurred. 

 Everything was delightful to the last moment of my stay 

 with my companion, because she was so." The turbulence 

 of doubt subsided, and a calm and elevating confidence took 

 its place. "What can I call myself," he writes to her in 

 a subsequent letter, " to convey most perfectly my affection 

 and love for you ? Can I or can truth say more than that for 

 this world I am yours? " Assuredly he made his profession 

 good, and no fairer light falls upon his character than that 

 which reveals his relations to his wife. Never, I believe, 

 existed a manlier, purer, steadier love. Like a burning 

 diamond, it continued to shed, for six-and-forty years, its 

 white and smokeless glow. 



Faraday was married on June 12, 1821; and up to this 

 date Davy appears throughout as his friend. Soon after- 

 ward, however, disunion occurred between them, which, 

 while it lasted, must have given Faraday intense pain. It 

 is impossible to doubt the honesty of conviction with which 

 this subject has been treated by Dr. Bence Jones, and there 

 may be facts known to him, but not appearing in these 

 volumes, which justify his opinion that Davy in those days 

 had become jealous of Faraday. This, which is the prev- 

 alent belief, is also reproduced in an excellent article in 

 the March number of " Eraser's Magazine/ 7 But the best 

 analysis I can make of the data fails to present Davy in 

 this light to me. The facts, as I regard them, are briefly 

 these. 



In 1820, Oersted of Copenhagen made the celebrated 

 discovery which connects electricity with magnetism, and 

 immediately afterward the acute mind of Wollaston per- 

 ceived that a wire carrying a current ought to rotate round 

 its own axis under the influence of a magnetic pole. In 

 1821 he tried, but failed, to realize this result in the lab- 

 oratory of the Royal Institution. Faraday was not present 

 at the moment, but he came in immediately afterward and 

 heard the conversation of Wollaston and Davy about the 

 experiment. He had also heard a rumor of a wager that 

 Dr. Wollaston would eventually succeed. 



This was in April. In the autumn of the same year 

 Faraday wrote a history of electro-magnetism, and repeated 



