194 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
a lecture delivered before Priuce Albert, in which he advocates 
the teaching of natural science in our schools and colleges. 
In 1858 Her Majesty allotted him a residence at Hampton Court, 
where he died on the 25th August 1867, in the 76th year of his age. 
We cannot close this brief sketch of the life of Faraday without 
a notice, however imperfect, of several of the brilliant discoveries 
which have placed him at the head of the experimental philoso- 
phers of every age. 
His first experiment, made in 1816, was an analysis of a specimen 
of caustic lime, which was published, with observations, by Sir H. 
Davy. In 1817 and 1818, he discovered that the velocity of gases 
in passing through a narrow tube, depended not only on their 
density, but on their own nature ; and these experiments were 
followed, at different dates, by a variety of what may be called his 
minor discoveries, when compared with those on electricity and 
magnetism. The most important of these relate to the combustion 
of the diamond ; — to the sounds produced by a bar of heated iron 
laid upon a mass of metal, the experiment of Mr A. Trevelyan, 
described in our Transactions ; — to the evaporation of mercury at 
low temperatures ; — to the optical illusions produced in the pheno- 
kistoscope of Plateau ; — to the acoustic figures of Chladni; — to the 
remarkable phenomenon of regelation , so successfully pursued by 
Professor Tyndall ; — and to the mysterious movements of turning 
tables, which he so ingeniously explained. In 1820 he described 
two new compounds of chlorine and carbon. In 1823 he began 
his fine experiments on the condensation of gases into liquids ; and, 
by refrigerating mixtures, he obtained liquids more dense than 
water, from a variety of gases ; but in 1844, by combining a 
mechanical pressure of fifty atmospheres with cold of - 166° of 
Fahrenheit, he obtained in a liquid state olefiant gas, fluosilicic acid, 
phosphorated hydrogen, and arsenical hydrogen. With this double 
power he converted the first gases which he liquefied into solid 
crystals, but those last mentioned he was not able to solidify. In 
the compression of oil gas, in 1825, he discovered a new compound, 
the bicarburet of hydrogen, from which Dr Hoffman has extracted 
another substance of great value in the production of colour. In 
1857, Faraday published his curious experiment, in which a gold 
leaf, placed upon a plate of glass, becomes transparent and colourless 
