650 ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR LOVERING. 
This discovery was revolutionary in its character, but it made no 
great stir in science at the time. The world did not awake to its 
full significance until the perplexing problem of ocean telegraphs 
converted it from a theoretical proposition into a practical reality, 
` and forced it on the attention of electricians. The eminent scien- 
tific advisers of the cable companies were the first to do justice to 
Faraday. This is one of the many returns made to theoretical 
electricity for the support it gave to the most magnificent com- 
mercial enterprise. 3 
he discovery of diamagnetism furnished another argument in 
favor of the new interpretation of physical action. What that 
new interpretation was is well described by Maxwell. “ Faraday, 
in his mind’s eye, saw lines of force traversing all space, where the 
mathematicians saw centres of force attracting at a distance; 
Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance; 
Faraday sought the seat of the phenomena in real actions going 
on in the medium, they were satisfied that they had found it in & 
power of action at a distance impressed on the electric fluids.” 
The physical statement waited only for the coming of the mathe- 
maticians who could translate it into the language of analysis, 
and prove that it had as precise a numerical consistency 48 the 
old view with all the facts of observation. A paper published by 
Sir William Thomson, when he was an undergraduate at the one 
versity of Cambridge, pointed the way. Prof. Maxwell, in he 
masterly work on electricity and magnetism, which appeared in 
1873, has built a monument to Faraday, and unconsciously tO 
imself also, out of the strongest mathematics. For forty yoo 
mathematicians and physicists had labored to associate the laws 
of electrostatics and electrodynamics under some more general en 
pression. An early attempt was made by Gauss in 1835, but his 
process was published, for the first time, in the recent complete 
edition of his works. Maxwell objects to the formula of Gauss OF. | 
Webers 
cause it violates the law of the conservation of energy- 
method was made known in 1846 ; but it has not escaped the cr 
cism of Helmholtz. It represents faithfully the laws of _ . | 
tioof 
and the facts of induction, and led Weber to an absolute me 
ment of the electrostatic and electromagnetic units. The 
these units, according to the formulas, is a velocity ; an As 
ment shows that this velocity is equal to the velocity of light 
Weber's theory starts with the conception of action at & d 
and experi 
