My dear Grove,—... As to the Royal Society, you know my feeling towards it is for what it has been, and I hope may be. Its present state is not wholesome. You are aware that I am not on the council, and have not been for years, and have been to no meeting there for years; but I do hope for better times. I do not wonder at your feeling—all I meant to express was a wish that its circumstances and character should improve, and that it should again become a desirable reunion of all really scientific men. It has done much, is now doing much, in some parts of science, as its magnetic observations show, and I hope will some day become altogether healthy.
Ever, my dear Grove, yours sincerely,
M. Faraday.
Though he continued down to 1860 to send researches for publication to the Royal Society, he seldom attended its meetings.[56] He was not even present in November, 1845, on the occasion of the reading of his paper on the action of the magnet on light. In 1857 he declined the Presidency, though urged by the unanimous wish of the Council, as narrated on [p. 225].
Though in the meridian of his active life, he took no part in the founding of the British Association in 1831, but was at the Oxford meeting in 1832, being one of the four scientific men ([p. 65]) selected to receive the honorary degree of D.C.L. on that occasion. He also communicated a paper on Electro-chemical Decomposition to the B.A. meeting at Cambridge in 1833. He acted as president of the Chemical Section of the Association in 1837 at Liverpool, and in 1846 at Southampton; and he was chosen as vice-president of the Association itself in the years 1844, at York ([p. 224]); 1849, at Birmingham ([p. 256]); and 1853, at Hull. He delivered evening discourses in 1847, at Oxford, on Magnetic and Diamagnetic Phenomena; and in 1849, at Birmingham, on Mr. Gassiot’s Battery. He also contributed to the proceedings at the meetings at Ipswich in 1851 and at Liverpool in 1854.
His comparative aloofness from scientific organisations arose probably from the exceedingly individual nature of his own researches—to which allusion was made on [p. 242]—rather than from any lack of sympathy. He had no jealousy of co-operation in science. To Tyndall, then at Marburg, he wrote in 1850 rejoicing at the circumstance that the work on the magnetic properties of crystals was being taken up by others. “It is wonderful,” he says, “how much good results from different persons working at the same matter. Each one gives views and ideas new to the rest. When science is a republic, then it gains; and though I am no republican in other matters, I am in that.” Other causes there were, doubtless, tending to his isolation, amongst them an old jealousy, now long dead, against the Royal Institution on the part of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Above all, probably, was his detestation of controversy.
PRIORITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.
PRIORITY IN PUBLICATION.
Priority in scientific discovery was a matter which deeply concerned one whose life was devoted to scientific pioneering. To any question as to scientific priority between himself and other workers he was keenly sensitive. This was, indeed, natural in one who had voluntarily relinquished fortune, and retired from lucrative professional work, in the sole and single aim of advancing natural knowledge. His single-minded and sensitive nature made him particularly scrupulous in all such matters, and his early experiences must have added to the almost excessive keenness of his perceptions. Having had in 1823, when still merely assistant to Davy, to bear the double burden of a serious misunderstanding with Dr. Wollaston as to the originality of his discovery of the electro-magnetic rotations, and of a serious estrangement from his master arising out of the liquid chlorine discovery—an estrangement which threatened to cause his election to the Royal Society to be indefinitely postponed—he was in later life especially precise in dating and publishing his own researches. In 1831 there arose, concerning his great discovery of magneto-electric induction, a curious misunderstanding. His discovery was, as we have seen, made in September and October. He collected his results and arranged them in the splendid memoir—the first in the series of “Experimental Researches in Electricity”—which was read at the Royal Society on November 24th. The résumé of his work, which he wrote five days later to Phillips, is given on [pages 114–117]. A fortnight later he wrote a shorter and hasty letter in the same way to his friend, M. Hachette of Paris—a letter which Faraday subsequently well termed “unfortunate,” in view of the consequences that followed. M. Hachette, a week later, communicated Faraday’s letter to the Académie des Sciences on December 26th. It was published in Le Temps of December 28th. At that date the complete memoir read to the Royal Society was not yet printed or circulated. The consequence was that two Italian physicists, MM. Nobili and Antinori, seeing the brief letter, and “considering that the subject was given to the philosophical world for general pursuit,” immediately began researches on magneto-electric induction in ignorance of Faraday’s full work. Their results they embodied in a paper, in which they claimed to have “verified, extended, and, perhaps, rectified the results of the English philosopher,” accusing him of errors both in experiment and theory, and even of a breach of good faith as to what he had said about Arago’s rotations. This paper they dated January 31st, 1832; but it was published in the belated number of the Antologia for November, 1831, where its appearance at an apparently earlier date than Faraday’s original paper in the Philosophical Transactions made many Continental readers suppose that the researches of Nobili and Antinori preceded those of Faraday. In June, 1832, Faraday published in the Philosophical Magazine a translation of Nobili’s memoir, with his own annotations; and later in the year he wrote to Gay Lussac a long letter on the errors of Nobili and Antinori. He showed how, in spite of his efforts to clear up the misunderstanding, in spite of his having sent several months previously to MM. Nobili and Antinori copies of his original papers, no correction or retractation had been made by them; and he concluded by a dignified protest that none might say he had been too hasty to write that which might have been avoided. It may be taken that the rule now recognised as to priority of scientific publication—namely, that it dates from the day when the discoverer communicates it formally to any of the recognised learned societies—was virtually established by Faraday’s example. It will be remembered that writing to De la Rive in 1845, to tell him of his diamagnetic discoveries, he begged him to keep the matter secret, adding: “I ought (in order to preserve the respect due to the Royal Society) not to write a description to any one until the paper has been received or even read there.” To younger men he inculcated the necessity of proper and prompt publication of their researches if they would reap the benefit of their work. To Sir William Crookes, then a rising young chemist, he said: “Work, Finish, Publish.” Writing in 1853 to Professor Matteucci, who had been annoyed with him for allowing Du Bois Reymond, with whom Matteucci had had some controversy about priority, to dedicate his book to him, Faraday says: “Who has not to put up in his day with insinuations and misrepresentations in the accounts of his proceedings given by others, bearing for the time the present injustice, which is often unintentional, and often originates in hasty temper, and committing his fame and character to the judgment of the men of his own and future time?”... “I see that that moves you which would move me most—namely, the imputation of a want of good faith—and I cordially sympathise with any one who is so charged unjustly. Such cases have seemed to me almost the only ones for which it is worth while entering into controversy.”... “These polemics of the scientific world are very unfortunate things; they form the great stain to which the beautiful edifice of scientific truth is subject. Are they inevitable?”
Controversy whether in religion or science was to him alike detestable. He took no part in politics. A letter to Tyndall (see “Faraday as a Discoverer,” p. 39), written after the latter had told him of a rather heated discussion at the British Association meeting in 1855, speaks of his own efforts at forbearance. He says:—
These great meetings, of which I think very well altogether, advance science chiefly by bringing scientific men together and making them to know and be friends with each other; and I am sorry when that is not the effect in every part of their course.... The real truth never fails ultimately to appear.... It is better to be blind to the results of partisanship, and quick to see good will. One has more happiness in oneself in endeavouring to follow the things that make for peace. You can hardly imagine how often I have been heated in private when opposed, as I have thought unjustly and superciliously, and yet I have striven, and succeeded I hope, in keeping down replies of the like kind. And I know I have never lost by it.