expect to convince; but I may be allowed to say that I cannot undertake to answer such objections as may be made. I state my own convictions as an experimental philosopher, and find it no more necessary to enter into controversy on this point than on any other in science, as the nature of matter, or inertia, or the magnetization of light, on which I may differ from others. The world will decide sooner or later in all such cases, and I have no doubt very soon and correctly in the present instance. Those who may wish to see the particular construction of the test apparatus which I have employed, may have the opportunity at Mr. Newman's, 122 Regent Street. Further, I may say, I have sought earnestly for cases of lifting by attraction, and indications of attraction in any form, but have gained no traces of such effects. Finally, I beg to direct attention to the discourse delivered by Dr. Carpenter at the Royal Institution on the 12th of March, 1852, entitled, "On the Influence of Suggestion in modifying and directing Muscular Movement, independently of Volition;" which, especially in the latter part, should be considered in reference to table-moving by all who are interested in the subject.
The Bakerian Lecture.—Experimental Relations of Gold (and other Metals) to Light[1].
[Received November 15, 1856,—Read February 5, 1857.]
That wonderful production of the human mind, the undulatory theory of light, with the phenomena for which it strives to account, seems to me, who am only an experimentalist, to stand midway between what we may conceive to be the coarser mechanical actions of matter, with their explanatory philosophy, and that other branch, which includes, or should include, the physical idea of forces acting at a distance; and admitting for the time the existence of the ether, I have often struggled to perceive how far that medium might account for or mingle in with such actions generally; and to what extent experimental trials might be devised, which, with their results and consequences, might contradict, confirm, enlarge, or modify the idea we form of it, always with the hope that the corrected or instructed idea would
- ↑ Philosophical Transaction, 1857, p. 145.
