182 HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY. 



and to enter into the service of science, which I 

 imagined made its pursuers amiable and liberal, 

 induced me at last to take the bold and simple step 

 of writing to Sir H. Davy." He was favourably 

 received, and, in the next year, became Davy's 

 assistant at the Institution; and afterwards his 

 successor. The Institution which produced such 

 researches as those of these two men, may well be 

 considered as a great school of exact and philoso- 

 phical chemistry. Mr. Faraday, from the beginning 

 of his course of inquiry, appears to have had the 

 consciousness that he was engaged on a great con- 

 nected work. His Experimental Researches, which 

 appeared in a series of Memoirs in the Philosophical 

 Transactions, are divided into short paragraphs, 

 numbered in a continued order from 1 up to 1160, 

 at the time at which I write 10 ; and destined, pro- 

 bably, to extend much further. These paragraphs 

 are connected by a very rigorous method of investi- 

 gation and reasoning which runs through the whole 

 body of them. Yet this unity of purpose was not at 

 first obvious. His first two Memoirs were upon sub- 

 jects which we have already treated of, (B. xiii. c. 5 

 and c. 8,) Voltaic Induction, and the evolution of 

 Electricity from Magnetism. His "Third Series" has 

 also been already referred to. Its object was, as a 



10 December, 1835. (At present, when I am revising the 

 second edition, September 1846, Dr. Faraday has recently pub- 

 lished the " Twenty-first Series" of his Researches ending with 

 paragraph 2453.) 



