Michael Faraday, his Life and Works. 171 
is incredible. And what would it have been if, side by side with 
the multitude of experiments which he has made known, we 
placed in a parallel series those which he never published ? It 
is true that if he has left them buried in his journal, it is be- 
cause they gave him negative results; but from how many 
fruitless essays and erroneous attempts he would have preserved 
scientific men if he had not been so discreet ! 
A second character is the exactitude of the results obtained: 
I do not think that Faraday has once been caught in a mistake; 
So precise and conscientious was his mode of experimenti 
and observing. It must be admitted that in him the han 
marvellously seconded the head; he was of remarkable dexter- 
ity, and possessed a practical talent, rare and precious in men 
of science, which enabled him, when necessary, to construct 
and modify his apparatus for himself, with the view of attain- 
method or the steps of his master, and, soon quitting the 
himsel 
_ At the commencement of the present century, thanks to the 
important works of which it had been the subject, the science 
of physics had acquired a character of precision and clearness 
which seemed almost to make of it a mathematical science. 
The fine treatise, in four volumes, on Experimental and Math- 
ematical Physics, published in 1816 by M. Biot, gives the 
Most correct and complete idea of the point at which this sci- 
ence had arrived. To the confusion which still reigned in the 
ceptions; hence we find it greatly used, as witness the very title | 
Sa ake ets ed (in 1820), upon the relations 
“he great discovery of Girsted (in 1520), upon the relatio 
existing between electricity and magnetism, began to diminish 
in this mode of considering the phenomen: 
+o 
