liii 



conception, full of finished and most accurate work in execution ; n quan- 

 tity so vast that it seems impossible one man could have done so much ; 

 and this will appear still more when it is remembered that Anderson's 

 help may be summed up in two words, blind obedience. 



The use of magneto-electricity in induction machines, in electrotyping, 

 and in lighthouses are the most important practical applications of the 

 * Experimental Researches in Electricity ; but who can attempt to measure 

 or imagine the stimulus and the assistance which these researches have 

 given, and will give, to other investigators ? 



Lastly, if we look at the circumstances under which this work was done, 

 we shall see that during the greater part of these twenty years the Royal 

 Institution was kept alive by the innumerable Friday lectures which he 

 gave at it. " We were living," as he once said to the managers, " on the 

 parings of our own skin." He had no grant from the Royal Society, and 

 during the whole of this time the fixed income which the Institution could 

 afford to give him was £100 a year, to which the Fullerian professorship 

 added nearly £ 100 more. 



By the 'Experimental Researches in Electricity,' Faraday's scientific life 

 may be divided into three parts. The first lasted to 1830, when he was 

 thirty-eight; the second, or "research period," lasted to 1851 ; and the 

 third and final period began in 1852, and continued to his last report to 

 the Trinity House (in 1865) on the foci and descent of a beam of light 

 336 feet at St. Bees Lighthouse. 



Mt. 60 (1852). 



The first and last Friday discourses of the season were on Lines of Mag- 

 netic Force. In the Philosophical Magazine there was a long paper on the 

 Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force. He begins with a note : 

 — " The following paper contains so much of a speculative and hypothetical 

 nature that I have thought it more fitted for the pages of the Philosophical 



Magazine than for those of the Philosophical Transactions " " The 



paper, as is evident, follows series xxviii. and xxix., and depends much for 

 its experimental support on the more strict results and conclusions contained 

 in them." 



He made many reports to the Trinity House, among others : — on adul- 

 terated white-lead ; on oil in iron tanks ; on impure olive-oils ; on the 

 Caskets lighthouse. And the question of the use of Watson's electric light 

 was first moved by a letter of Br. Watson to the Trinity House. 



In October he wrote a long letter to M. De la Rive. "... Do not 

 for a moment suppose I am unhappy. I am occasionally dull in spirits, 

 but not unhappy. There is a hope which is an abundantly sufficient re- 

 medy for that ; and as that hope does not depend on ourselves, I am bold 

 enough to rejoice in that I may have it. 



" I do not talk to you about philosophy, for I forget it all too fast to make 

 it easy to talk about. When I have a thought worth sending you, it is in 



