[59] Paris, i. 154.
[60] Researches, 482.
But yet we cannot look upon this Memoir of 1806, otherwise than as a great event, perhaps the most important event of the epoch now under review. And as such it was recognized at once all over Europe. In particular, it received the distinguished honor of being crowned by the Institute of France, although that country and England were then engaged in fierce hostility. Buonaparte had proposed a prize of sixty thousand francs “to the person who by his experiments and discoveries should advance the knowledge of electricity and galvanism, as much as Franklin and Volta did;” and “of three thousand francs for the best experiment which should be made in the course of each year on the galvanic fluid;” the latter prize was, by the First Class of the Institute, awarded to Davy.
From this period he rose rapidly to honors and distinctions, and reached a height of scientific fame as great as has ever fallen to the lot of a discoverer in so short a time. I shall not, however, dwell on such circumstances, but confine myself to the progress of my subject.
Sect. 2.—Establishment of the Electro-chemical Theory by Faraday.
The defects of Davy’s theoretical views will be seen most clearly by explaining what Faraday added to them. Michael Faraday was in every way fitted and led to become Davy’s successor in his great career of discovery. In 1812, being then a bookseller’s apprentice, he attended the lectures of Davy, which at that period excited the highest admiration.[61] “My desire to escape from trade,” Mr. Faraday says, “which I thought vicious and selfish, and to enter into the service of science, which I imagined made its pursuers amiable and liberal, induced me at last to take the bold and simple step of writing to Sir H. Davy.” He was favorably received, and, in the next year, became [297] Davy’s assistant at the Institution; and afterwards his successor. The Institution which produced such researches as those of these two men, may well be considered as a great school of exact and philosophical chemistry. Mr. Faraday, from the beginning of his course of inquiry, appears to have had the consciousness that he was engaged on a great connected work. His Experimental Researches, which appeared in a series of Memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions, are divided into short paragraphs, numbered into a continued order from 1 up to 1160, at the time at which I write;[62] and destined, probably, to extend much further. These paragraphs are connected by a very rigorous method of investigation and reasoning which runs through the whole body of them. Yet this unity of purpose was not at first obvious. His first two Memoirs were upon subjects which we have already treated of (B. xiii. [c. 5] and [c. 8]), Voltaic Induction, and the evolution of Electricity from Magnetism. His “Third Series” has also been [already] referred to. Its object was, as a preparatory step towards further investigation, to show the identity of voltaic and animal electricity with that of the electrical machine; and as machine electricity differs from other kinds in being successively in a state of tension and explosion, instead of a continued current, Mr. Faraday succeeded in identifying it with them, by causing the electrical discharge to pass through a bad conductor into a discharging-train of vast extent; nothing less, indeed, than the whole fabric of the metallic gas-pipes and water-pipes of London. In this Memoir[63] it is easy to see already traces of the general theoretical views at which he had arrived; but these are not expressly stated till his “Fifth Series;” his intermediate Fourth Series being occupied by another subsidiary labor on the conditions of conduction. At length, however, in the Fifth Series, which was read to the Royal Society in June, 1833, he approaches the theory of electro-chemical decomposition. Most preceding theorists, and Davy amongst the number, had referred this result to attractive powers residing in the poles of the apparatus; and had even pretended to compare the intensity of this attraction at different distances from the poles. By a number of singularly beautiful and skilful experiments, Mr. Faraday shows that the phenomena can with no propriety be [298] ascribed to the attraction of the poles.[64] “As the substances evolved in cases of electro-chemical decomposition may be made to appear against air,[65] which, according to common language, is not a conductor, nor is decomposed; or against water,[66] which is a conductor, and can be decomposed; as well as against the metal poles, which are excellent conductors, but undecomposable; there appears but little reason to consider this phenomenon generally as due to the attraction or attractive powers of the latter, when used in the ordinary way, since similar attractions can hardly be imagined in the former instances.”
[61] Paris, ii. 3.
[62] December, 1835. (At present, when I am revising the second edition, September, 1846, Dr. Faraday has recently published the “Twenty-first Series” of his Researches ending with paragraph 2453.)
[63] Phil. Trans. 1833.
[64] Researches, Art. 497