CONNECTION OF ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, 259 



not quite got so far as the strict modern view of ' matter' as being but 

 an expression for modes or manifestations of ' force."^* 



But if we leave oat of account for the present tlie development of the 

 ideas of science, and confine our attention to the extension of its bound- 

 aries, we shall see that it was most essential that Newton's method 

 should be extended to every branch of science to Avhich it was applica- 

 ble — that we should investigate the forces with which bodies act on each 

 other in the first place, before attempt ing to explain lioic that force is 

 transmitted. ISo men could be better fitted to ai^ply themselves exclu- 

 sively to the first part of the problem than those who considered the 

 second part quite unnecessary. 



Accordingly, Cavendish, Coulomb, and Poisson, the founders of the 

 exact sciences of electricity and magnetism, paid no regard to those old 

 notions of " magnetic elfluvia" and "electric atmospheres" which had 

 been put fortli in the previous century, but turned their undivided atten- 

 tion to the determination of the law of force according to which electri- 

 fied and magnetized bodies attract or repel each other. In this way the 

 true laws of these actions were discovered. And this was done by men 

 who never doubted that the action took place at a distance, without the 

 intervention of any medium, and who would have regarded the discovery 

 of such a medium as complicating rather than as explaining the 

 undoubted phenomena of attraction. 



We have now arrived at the great discovery by Oersted of the con- 

 nection between electricity and magnetism. Oersted found that an elec- 

 tric current acts on a magnetic pole, but that it neither attracts it nor 

 repels it, but causes it to move round the current. He expressed this 

 by saying that " the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner.'^ 



The most obvious deduction from this new fact was that the action of 

 the current on the magnet is not a push-and-pull force, but a rotatory 

 force, and accordingly many minds were set a speculating on vortices 

 and streams of ether whirling round the current. 



But Ampere, by a combination of mathematical skill with experi- 

 mental ingenuity, first proved-that two electric currents act on one 

 another, and then analyzed this action into the resultant of a system of 

 push-and-j)ull forces between the elementary jjarts of these currents. 



The formula of Ampere, however, is of extreme complexity as com- 

 pared with Newton's law of gravitation, and many attempts have been 

 made to resolve it into something of greater apparent simplicity. 



I have no wish to lead you into a discussion of any of these attempts 

 to improve a mathematical formula. Let us turn to the independent 

 method of investigation employed by Faraday in those researches in 

 electricity and magnetism which have made this institution one of the 

 most venerable shrines of science. 



No man ever more conscientiously and systematically labored to im 

 prove all his powers of mind than did Faraday from the very beginning 



* Review of Mrs. Somerville, '•' Saturday Review," February 13, 1869, vol. vii, No. 5S. 



