ELECTRICITY, Experimental Researches in, by Michael Faraday (18.39-55). A monu mental work in the literature of science; not merely recording the results of experiment in what Tyndall called aa career of discovery un paralleled in the history of pure experimental science," but enriching the record with thoughts, and clothing it in many passages in a style worthy of exceptional recognition. In devising and executing experiments for passing beyond the limits of existing knowledge, in a field the most difficult ever attempted by researth, Fara day showed a genius and achieved a success, marking him as a thinker not less than an ob server of the first order. In strength and sureness of imagination, penetrating the secrets of force in nature, and putting the finger of exact demonstration upon them, he was a Shakespeare of research, the story of whose work has a permanent interest. He made elec tricity, in one of its manifesnitions, explain magnetism. He showed to demonstration that chemical action is purely electrical, and that to electricity the atoms of matter owe those prop erties which constitute them elements in nature. In language of lofty prophetic conception he more than suggested that the physical secret of living things, the animal and the plant, is electrical. He particularly dwelt on the amount of electricity forming the charge carried by the oxygen of the air, which is the active agent in combustion and the supporter of life in both animals and plants, and only stopped short of definitely pronouncing vitality electrical. He
urged very strongly as a belief, to which no test of experiment could be applied, that gravi tation is by electrical agency, and that in fact the last word of discovery and demonstration in physics will show that electricity is the uni versal agency in nature. And among his far reaching applications of thought guided by new knowledge was his rejection of the idea of "action at a distance,' in the manner of "attrac tion." If a body is moved, it is not by a mys terious pull, but by a push. The moving force carries it These ideas outran the power of science to immediately understand and accept But Maxwell, Hertz and Helmholtz have led the way after Faraday, to the extent that his electrical explanation of light is now fully ac cepted. Fifteen years after his death, the great est of his successors in physics, Helmholtz of Berlin, said in a Faraday lecture in London, that the later advances in electrical science had more than confirmed Faraday's conclusions, and that English science had made a mistalce in not accepting them as its point of departure for new research. See LIGHT. •