196 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



branclie, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Locke lived a century before 

 the time of which I speak, but their doctrines were still con- 

 tinuing to prevail, and to be discussed. David Hume was 

 dead only one year, and Emanuel Kant, Thomas Eeid, Dugald 

 StcAvart, and Thomas Brown, were all alive after 1777, the 

 last three having filled chairs in our Scottish universities, and 

 whose fame as metaphysicians spread over all Europe. 



Period 1827 to 1877. — Three celebratad names occur to us 

 as bridging over the union of the two half-centuries, these 

 men having lived and flourished in both. I refer to William 

 Hyde WoUaston, Sir Humphry Davy, and Michael Faraday, 

 all chemists, but more than that, distinguished philosophers 

 in a general and extended sense. 



Wollaston was the discoverer of the metals PJiodium and 

 Paladium. His researches were numerous, not merely con- 

 fined to chemistry, but to electricity and optics. Mineralogy 

 also felt the benefit of his labours. In electrical science he 

 showed the identity of galvanism with frictional electricity. 

 He was besides the inventor of numerous valuable philoso- 

 phical instruments. Wollaston died in 1829. 



Sir Humphry Davy's name is familiar to all Englishmen 

 of the present generation. The discoveries which established 

 his fame were the decomposition of the fixed alkalies by 

 galvanism and the metallic nature of their bases, to which 

 he gave the names Sodium and Potassium. Davy died in 

 1829, at an early age. His fame is identified with the chemi- 

 cal chair of the Eoyal Institution, his immediate successor 

 being 



Michael Faraday. He was one of the greatest physical 

 philosophers of the nineteenth century. In regard to the 

 following expressive sentence regarding his labours I am 

 under obligations to a recent biographer, who says : " His 

 (Faraday's) researches have had few parallels in the history of 

 science as regards the magnitude and interests of the results 

 obtained. They are surpassed by none others as specimens 

 of pure inductive inquiry, and evince an ardent love of 

 philosophic truth, wholly free from the jealousy which too 

 often distorts the search after it. He was an eminent example 

 of genius submitting itself to the strictest laws of philoso- 



