The Letters of Faraday, and Schönbein, 1836–1862; with Notes, Comments and References to Contemporary Letters

Abstract

THE correspondence which has passed between the great pioneers of modern science must always be of interest to the present generation of workers. The interest is enhanced for us in the present case through the circumstance that one of the correspondents was our eminent countryman, Michael Faraday. The custom which has grown up of late years of allowing our illustrious dead to speak for themselves through their own letters is in every way a good one—particularly when the correspondence enables us to trace the history and follow the development of discoveries which have now become incorporated in the general stock of scientific knowledge. There is a living reality about a man's description of his own work, which inspires the reader to a degree quite incapable of being produced by any bald text-book statement or formal lecture-room utterance. Such correspondence is even as valuable in some cases as the original memoirs in which the final results are set forth, because we are enabled to follow the actual working out of the various lines of thought, and to stand at the elbow of the investigator as he gropes his way towards the truths which he finally gives to the world.

The Letters of Faraday, and Schönbein, 1836–1862; with Notes, Comments and References to Contemporary Letters.

Edited by Georg W. A. Kahlbaum Francis V. Darbishire. Pp. xvi + 376. With two frontispiece portraits. (Bâle: Benno Schwabe. London: Williams and Norgate, 1899.)