The interrupted lecture was resumed after a fortnight’s interval; and he made up the full number of lectures by giving two extra discourses, at one of which the Prince Consort was present.
At another lecture [in 1856] Faraday explained the magnet and strength of attraction. He made us all laugh heartily; and when he threw a coalscuttle full of coals, a poker, and a pair of tongs at the great magnet, and they stuck there, the theatre echoed with shouts of laughter.
His friend De la Rive testified in striking terms to Faraday’s power as a speaker.
Nothing can give a notion of the charm which he imparted to these improvised lectures, in which he knew how to combine animated, and often eloquent, language with a judgment and art in his experiments which added to the clearness and elegance of his exposition. He exerted an actual fascination upon his auditors; and when, after having initiated them into the mysteries of science, he terminated his lecture, as he was in the habit of doing, by rising into regions far above matter, space, and time, the emotion which he experienced did not fail to communicate itself to those who listened to him, and their enthusiasm had no longer any bounds.
Faraday remained all his life a keen observer of other lecturers. Visiting France in 1845, he went to hear Arago give an astronomical lecture. “He delivered it in an admirable manner to a crowded audience,” was his comment.
To the Secretary of the Institution, who in 1846 consulted him regarding evening lectures, he said:
I see no objection to evening lectures if you can find a fit man to give them. As to popular lectures (which at the same time are to be respectable and sound), none are more difficult to find. Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach. They know little of the matter who think science is more easily to be taught or learned than A B C; and yet who ever learned his A B C without pain and trouble? Still, lectures can (generally) inform the mind, and show forth to the attentive man what he really has to learn, and in their way are very useful, especially to the public. I think they might be useful to us now, even if they only gave an answer to those who, judging by their own earnest desire to learn, think much of them. As to agricultural chemistry, it is no doubt an excellent and a popular subject, but I rather suspect that those who know least of it think that most is known about it.
USE OF MODELS AND CARDS.
His fondness for illustrating obscure points in his lectures by models has been more than once alluded to. He would improvise these out of wood, paper, wire, or even out of turnips or potatoes, with much dexterity of hand. In one of his unpublished manuscripts, dating about 1826, dealing with the then recently discovered phenomena of electromagnetism, occurs the following note:—
It is best for illustration to have a model of the constant position which the needle takes across the wire: le voila ([Fig. 21]).