Page:Experimental researches in electricity.djvu/15

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Introduction
xi

of him always delight me. We shall look at his black sulphur together. I heard from Schonbein the other day. He tells me that Liebig is full of ozone, i.e. of allotropic oxygen.

"Good-bye for the present.—Ever, my dear Tyndall, yours truly,

M. Faraday."

The contemplation of nature, and his own relation to her, produced in Faraday a kind of spiritual exaltation which makes itself manifest here. His religious feeling and his philosophy could not be kept apart; there was an habitual overflow of the one into the other.

Whether he or another was its exponent, he appeared to take equal delight in science. A good experiment would make him almost dance with delight. In November 1850, he wrote to me thus:—"I hope some day to take up the point respecting the magnetism of associated particles. In the meantime I rejoice at every addition to the facts and reasoning connected with the subject. When science is a republic, then it gains: and though I am no republican in other matters, I am in that." All his letters illustrate this catholicity of feeling. Ten years ago, when going down to Brighton, he carried with him a little paper I had just completed, and afterwards wrote to me. His letter is a mere sample of the sympathy which he always showed to me and my work.

"Brighton, December 9, 1857.

"My dear Tyndall,—I cannot resist the pleasure of saying how very much I have enjoyed your paper. Every part has given me delight. It goes on from point to point beautifully. You will find many pencil marks, for I made them as I read. I let them stand, for though many of them receive their answer as the story proceeds, yet they show how the wording impresses a mind fresh to the subject, and perhaps here and there you may like to alter it slightly, if you wish the full idea, i.e. not an inaccurate one, to be suggested at first; and yet after all I believe it is not your exposition, but the natural jumping to a conclusion that affects or has affected my pencil.

" We return on Friday, when I will return you the paper.—Ever truly yours,

M. Faraday."

The third letter will come in its proper place towards the end.

While once conversing with Faraday on science, in its