SECTION B.—CHEMISTRY. 
MICHAEL FARADAY AND 
THE THEORY OF ELECTROLYTIC 
CONDUCTION. 
ADDRESS BY 
SIR HAROLD HARTLEY, C.B.E., M.C., F.R.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
WHEN you did me the honour of inviting me to preside over your Section 
at the hundredth meeting of the Association, it seemed to me almost 
inevitable that my address to you should be a retrospect, recalling to you 
some of the great achievements of chemists since 1831. This week our 
guests from abroad have joined us in celebrating two centenaries, and I 
trust you will not find it appropriate that my address should be a tribute 
to the memory of Michael Faraday and a sketch of the development 
through the century of the work which was his classic contribution to 
chemical science. It would be invidious to try to make any distinction 
between chemistry and physics, and Faraday himself would be no party 
to such a division. ‘Such a difference,’ he said, “is a mere play upon 
words, and shows ignorance rather than understanding "—and indeed he 
is the outstanding example of the essential unity of the two subjects. 
But we cannot forget to-day that Faraday was in a sense the discovery 
of a chemist, that he was trained in a chemical laboratory, that his early 
triumphs were in the field of chemistry, and that he was one of the 
great masters of chemical technique. 
He presided over this Section in 1837 at Liverpool and again in 1846 
at Southampton. There is, alas, no record of his addresses, but of the 
Liverpool meeting he wrote: ‘ To-day I think we made our Section rather 
more interesting that was expected, and to-morrow I expect will be good 
also ’—and with Faraday in the Chair, no doubt it was. 
I feel some hesitation in speaking to you of Faraday. It is almost 
impossible to say anything new of him or anything adequate to his great 
genius. To try and explain Faraday seems an impertinence, but my 
tribute to his memory, however inadequate, must be to tell again the 
story of the early years of his apprenticeship to chemistry, and to trace 
the steps which led him to the researches which still remain the foundation 
of electrochemistry. There is no time to speak of his early life. The 
first intimate glimpse we have of his amazing natural gifts and his love of 
science, is as a bookbinder’s apprentice with only the rudiments of educa- 
tion, when at the age of nineteen he is writing long letters to Abbott 
describing his experiments in electricity and arguing convincingly about 
