324t On Mr Faradaifs Experimental Researches. 



considered his advocate, even keeping within the just limits of 

 the excellent motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in verba, 

 without viciously extending it to facta. 



Even where Mr Faraday endeavours to be just, at least in one 

 instance, he is hardly so. In a note, in his fifth dissertation, 

 at page 680, he refers to an experiment of my brother's, given 

 in his Bakerian Lecture for 1806, in confirmation of Dr Wol- 

 laston's experiments in proof of the identity of the electricity of 

 the common machine and of the voltaic battery. After noti- 

 cing it, and how oxygen and hydrogen were obtained separately 

 from each other; and saying, had he known of it, it ought to 

 have been quoted in an earlier series of his researches, he adds, 

 * 4 but it does not remove any of the objections I have made to 

 the use of Wollaston's apparatus as a test of true electrical ac- 

 tion. ,, This conveys the idea that the experiment was not de- 

 cisive, and that Dr Ritchie's objections to the original experi- 

 ment of Dr Wollaston (that the electricity, like a dart, might 

 cleave a molecule of water, and so disjoint mechanically its ele- 

 ments *), was applicable to it ; which is not the case, as the gases 

 were separately obtained, — hydrogen at the point connected 

 with the positive conductor. This experiment is given by my 

 brother in a note, as mentioned by Mr Faraday ; but Mr Fara- 

 day takes no notice of the text, in which other results in proof 

 of the identity of the electricities are described, as the evolution 

 of potash round the negatively electrified point (operating on a 

 solution of sulphate of potash), and sulphuric acid round the po- 

 sitive point; and, moreover, the transfer of sulphuric acid through 

 moist asbestus into water ; " so that (to use my brother's words), 

 there can be no doubt that the principle of action is the same in 

 common and the voltaic electricity "(*,'""— a conclusion Mr Faraday 

 has drawn from his own researches alone, as if those of my bro- 

 ther had never been made, and not acknowledging them even 

 when he was aware they had been made. 



I have the less hesitation in offering these remarks to the 

 Royal Society, confident that, like the Academicians del Ci- 

 mento, our best and earliest examples in scientif^ research, they 

 have always been anxious, " Storicamente narrare, e di non de- 

 fraudar mai gPinventori di esse (esperienze) dell* invenzione, e 



• Phil. Trans. 1832, p. 282. f Ibid. 1807, p. 31. 



