THE 

 LONDON, EDINBURGH, and DUBLIN 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 



AND 



JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



DECEMBER 1867. 



LIV. Michael Faraday, his Life and Works. 

 By Professor A. de la Rive*. 



SCIENCE has just lost one of its most eminent and faithful 

 representatives. Faraday died on Sunday, the 25th of 

 August 1867, at Hampton Court ; he was born on the 24th of 

 September 1791, at Newington Butts, near London. In 180-1, 

 at the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, in 

 whose workshop he remained eight years. So many books 

 passed through his hands that he could not resist the temptation 

 of opening and reading some of them. These readings, per- 

 formed in the evenings after the work of the day was finished, 

 gave him a taste for study, and in particular for that of the 

 sciences. The Encyclopedia Britannica first of all introduced 

 him to some notions of electricity ; aud it was afterwards, from the 

 works of Mrs. Marcet, that he derived his first knowledge of che- 

 mistry. His labours received their permanent direction from this 

 opening ; their essential objects were electricity and chemistry. 

 "Do not fancy," he said to me in a letterf of the 2nd of Oc- 

 tober 1858, in which he gives me these details, "that I was a 

 profound thinker or a precocious child; I had merely a good 

 deal of life and imagination, and the tales of the Thousand and 

 One Nights pleased me as much as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 



* Translated from the Bibliotheque Universelle, October 25, \867,Arch. 

 des Sci. pp. 131-176. 



t This letter was addressed to me on the occasion of the death of Mrs. 

 Marcet, and the notice which I was about to publish on this distinguished 

 woman (see Bibl. Univ. nouvelle se'rie, 1858, vol. hi.). 



s-Mtek Mat/. S. 4. Vol. 34. No. 232. Bee. 1867. 2 E 



