Michael Faraday

THERE will scarcely, it would seem, be any likelihood of failure or stint, within the limits of the recent generation at least, in the affectionate interest which lingers around the scientific services and the personal worth of Faraday. Throughout the continent of Europe, and whenever in East or West science has made itself a center and, a home: witness has been borne to the gains which his rare genius has brought to the general knowledge of nature, and to the blank which his loss has made painfully felt among the cultivators of physical truth. The utter absence of self-interest, the unconscious subordination of all mercenary or ambitious motives to the advancement of truth and the benefit of society, was a feature in the moral aspect of this consummate philosopher to be best appreciated by those whose special studies led them along the same track of discovery, and to whom he was forever holding out an ungrudging hand as fellow traveller, counsellor, and guide. The simplicity of his heart, his candour, his ardent love of truth, his cordial interest in the successes and his ingenuous admiration of the discoveries of others, his natural modesty in regard to what he himself discovered, his noble soul, independent and bold - all these gifts combined, with unsurpassed powers of intellect to give an incomparable charm to the nature of the real; physicist. Among foreign savants we might point to M. A. de la Rive as one who as dwelt in the most appreciative spirit upon the methods of investigation most characteristic of Faraday's genius, together with the spirit of truthfulness which, like a talisman, seemed to ward off every danger to which his mighty gift of imagination might expose its master. An exquisite scientific tact, like a presentiment of the possible, kept him from straying into what might prove false or fantastic. Hence it was that what seemed like dangerously leaving the beaten track and giving the rein to the imaginative faculty, futile or harmful as it might be in the case of mediocre minds, frequently led to vast and valuable results in the case of Faraday. It is the strong sense of personal relation between the writer and the subject of this biography that gives its special value. Intimately associated however as the writer was for years with one so consummate, not only in experimental work but in the intuitive flash which his genius seemed to throw into the dark laces of nature, there could hardly fail to be impressed upon the mind of his assistant and pupil something that to the outside world might speak of the master, might carry on his teaching, and reflect the glory of his intellect. To be trained under the discipline and in habitual contact with the methods pursued by the first of experimentists', seems to have been felt as a privilege, and as a plea for any amount of hero-worship. If the result of a certain veneration even for the ground trodden by his master is to throw a halo of disproportionate or exaggerated light over the pettiest details of act and speech, it may be urged on behalf of this book's author, John Hall Gladstone, that simplicity and the absence of stirring events were the conditions of life set by the character itself which forms his model. It is only by multiplication of slight traits and unstudied indications that a personality so averse to display, so absolutely unconscious of self, is to be realized to the eyes of the world at large.