Chapter LI: Hung Chang (4)

To illustrate this fact, let us take the black obelisk of Shalmaneser II., found by Layard at Nimroud. It is a column of basalt seven feet high and about two feet wide at the base, from which it narrows slightly, until near the top it is reduced by three steps. On the four sides is engraved in five rows of bas-reliefs, twenty in all, the pictured history of the royal conquests, the submission of kings, and the presentation of tribute. Above and below, and between, in two hundred and ten lines, was cut an inscription which explained the figures, and gave a full historical and, of course, contemporary and official account of the glorious events of the royal reign. Not a line was defaced; at the British Museum it can be seen to-day as perfect as when engraved twenty-seven centuries ago. Other monuments of Shalmaneser have been found. One is a great monolith with a portrait of the king in all his fine array, and with one hundred and fifty-six lines of text. Another is a series of splendid bronze plates that covered great wooden gates, on which, in repoussé work, were pictures of the royal victories, and inscriptions explaining them. The Bible tells us of the rivalries and jealousies of Ahab and Jehu, kings of Israel, and Benhadad and Hazael, kings of Damascus. How surprising it is to find here not only the story of the successive campaigns of Shalmaneser against these same kings, the number of their chariots and soldiers, but to see pictured before us the tribute sent by Jehu. We learn that Shalmaneser reigned from 859 to 825 B.C., and we have the record of all his successive campaigns, the first twenty-six of which he led in person. There is not another country of which, before the invention of printing, we have so minute a history; and all had been lost, except the mention of a name or two, whether historical or legendary we hardly knew, until Layard and his fellow-explorers opened the mounds of Assyria.

But enough for Layard. He is only one, though the principal one, of all the explorers of the buried records of the empires of the Tigris and Euphrates. And Babylonia and Assyria are not the only countries that history required us to explore. Greece and its neighboring states and islands have not even yet been fairly investigated. Much of Asia Minor is still a virgin field. Syria and Palestine have hardly been scratched with the spade. More has been done in Egypt, but more yet is to be done. And when we go into the further east of Persia and Old Elam, not to speak of the yet farther east of Central Asia, now just beginning to yield strange treasures to daring travellers, and ancient India and China,--how ancient we know not at all,--there is field for centuries of further research. For we must go back past empires and kingdoms and tribal conditions to the very beginning of the human race on the earth, even if so it be, to the first _Pithecanthropus_ which men of science tell us was the link which connected _Homo sapiens_ with the race of primitive simians. And all this, it may well be, is preserved in undecaying records just a few feet under the ground, if one only knew where to dig for it; nay, we now know where to dig for the most and best of it, and we only await the Stratford Cannings, who will give the money, and the Austen Layards, who have the enthusiasm for the work.

After Layard and Rassam, after Rawlinson and Botta, George Smith took flying trips to the site of Nineveh twice that he might gather the remaining fragments of the great library of Asshurbanabal, and he died in the field far from home. It was he that found among Layard's tablets the Babylonian account of the Deluge, so much like that in the Bible. He was the first of a second generation who, following Rawlinson and Oppert, decipherers as well as explorers, were able to read as they found. I can only mention the names of the Englishmen Taylor and Loftus; of the Frenchmen, Place and De Sarzec; and, later, the Americans, Peters, Hilprecht, and Haynes, who have so faithfully explored the extremely archaic mound of Niffer, which I had the honor to recommend for excavation after I had visited the mounds of Southern Babylonia in the winter of 1884-85. And now the Germans, with scientific as well as commercial and political purpose, with their railroad to pass down the valley through Baghdad to the Persian Gulf, which gives them predominant influence, have sent expeditions well equipped with scholars and engineers to the choicest sites in Babylonia, to Warka, the ancient Erech, and to Babylon itself; and with Teuton thoroughness they are excavating the most famous of ancient ruins and gathering fresh treasures of archaeological research. Nor have they left the land of the Hittites unexplored, for Germany claims the first rights, politically, in all Anatolia, the right of succession and possession when the Turk is expelled, and German archaeological science is bound to be first on that field.

And now what have we found as the fruit of all this labor of exploration? Is it worth the labor and the expense?

Let us look first--it can be only a glance--at Egypt, for Egypt was the land first and most persistently explored. The French Government for scores of years has been at work there. Germans and Italians have explored the ruins; two English societies have for years kept expeditions in the field; and just now a Californian university sends an American Egyptologist to uncover the tombs and read the hieroglyphs of the kings. Not only are the figured monuments of Egypt published in princely folios, but its records have been translated and its lost history recovered to the world's knowledge. Instead of the bare "Pharaoh" of the Bible, a common designation for all the kings, and in place of a bare list of names and dynasties copied from Manetho, and so altered and corrupted in the copying as to be neither Greek nor Egyptian, we have, on scarab, or gravestone, or pyramid, or rock-sepulchre wall, in his own spelling, the name of almost every king from the latest time of the Ptolemies back to the first king of the first dynasty, five thousand--or was it six thousand?--years before Christ. And not their names only, but the very pictures of their wars. We see how they went up the Nile and fought the blacks of Abyssinia, and brought back the spoils of Punt We see them sending their squadrons into Syrian Asia, and waging a dubious battle with the Hittites before the walls of Hamath, where Rameses in his lion-guarded chariot performs prodigies of valor, and from which he returns not only to paint on sacred walls the picture of his victory, but also to inscribe a copy of the treaty of peace with the Hittite king, the earliest treaty in the preserved annals of diplomacy. Well wrought that Rameses the Great for eternal fame in the sixty years of his reign, fifteen centuries before the birth of our Lord. But what fame had been his, had not explorers and excavators and scholars dug and found and copied and translated what the sands had covered for centuries? And to-day the curious traveller stops in sight of the pyramids on the banks of the Nile, and enters the Bulaq Museum, and there he sees set up before him the very mummy of Rameses himself and of a dozen other royal personages, rifled from their tombs and displayed for your amazement and mine. There is the very Pharaoh--you can see his features, you can touch his coffin--who chased the Children of Israel out of Egypt. There are the household implements, the furniture of their homes, the jewelry their queens wore,--queens who were also sisters of the kings, as Sarah was the sister of Abraham.

Or would you know of some great revolution in Egypt? These decipherers of the inscriptions will tell you how the Shepherd Kings overthrew the native dynasty, coming with their armies from Asia long before Rameses, and changed religion and customs; under whom Jacob and his sons found hospitable welcome, until their hated race was expelled by a stronger native dynasty that knew not Joseph. Or they will tell you of the royal reformer Khuenaten, son of a famous Eastern mother, a queen from the banks of the Euphrates. Taught by her, perhaps, a purer religion, he attempted to replace the worship of Egypt's bestial gods by the worship of the one only great God, whose symbol was the sun. But the priestly clan was too strong for him, and the succeeding Pharaohs destroyed his records and chiselled out his name where it had been cut in stone that no memory of his sacrilege might be preserved. A royal Moses there could not be. The worshipper of one God, whether king or son of Pharaoh's daughter, could bring no reformation to Egypt.

Or would you learn how Egypt ruled its subject territory? You can read the correspondence of a dozen local Egyptian governors in Palestine and Syria in the century before Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. There is the letter of the King of Jerusalem, where Melchizedek reigned in the times of Abraham; and they tell of rebellions against the fading power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites. The earliest kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still, even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of civilization. Whence came that first dynasty? Who invented writing? Were they autochthons? Hardly. These are questions left for further explorers to answer. Probably those first messengers of civilization came from the East, perhaps from Arabia, perhaps from Babylonia, or perhaps the first Babylonians and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth of the Euphrates. Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief river of Paradise. Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known portion of the inhabited earth,--was it from Arabia that the wiser, stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters? We do not know. Some future explorer must teach us. But the German Glaser has within these few years brought back from hazardous journeys a multitude of inscriptions that tell of kingdoms that fringed its southern coast and extended we know not how far into the interior in those early days when one of the queens of Sheba brought presents to Solomon, and when, earlier still, we are told there were dukes of Edom before there was any king in Israel. They say that a railroad is to be built to Mecca; Arabia is not to be always a closed land, neighbor as it is to Egypt. We shall know one of these days whether, as scholars suspect, out of Arabia and across the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, where, at the southern end of the Red Sea, Africa almost touches Asia, there came that mighty flood of more forceful men, bred in the deserts and hills, who, passing down the Nile, first brought history to Egypt; and whether it was this same Semitic people, as scholars suspect again, that spread resistlessly eastward to the Euphrates valley, and did an equal service in conquering and assimilating the black aborigines of these swamps and lagoons. The spade will tell us.

Or was it still further east, in the highlands of Persia, that men first learned how to write and record history? We cannot go back so far in the history of Babylonia--Professor Hilprecht dares to carry us seven thousand years before Christ--that we do not find its kings fighting against Elam. And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite lands. What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention, the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants? And before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago? And so to France was given the right, for the honor and enrichment of the Louvre, to explore Persia; and De Morgan went to Susa, to Shushan, the palace of Xerxes and Darius, of Ahasuerus and Esther, in search of what was far earlier than they, for another Frenchman and his wife, M. and Mme. Dieulafoy, had already excavated the noble palace of these Persian kings. Far below the palace of Xerxes he has found vastly earlier remains. There is the column set up, if we can believe the Assyriologists who trust the chronology of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon,--and it is not incredible,--three thousand eight hundred years before Christ, by Naram-Sin, a Babylonian king, to commemorate one of his raids into the land of what were perhaps his stronger enemies. It is a noble composition, with archaic writing, and a stately figure of the king climbing the mountains and slaying his enemies; it shows an art that might well have developed into the best that Greece has produced. But De Morgan has only begun to scratch the surface of the mounds of Elam, and a multitude of scholars believe that out of Elam came the first civilization of Chaldea. We shall find out yet; for the record is in the earth, and only waits the man who will dig it out, and then the man who will read it.

We are tempted to go further east and recall that in India, the land where Alexander made his most distant conquests, a multitude of English scholars have been searching the ruins of old temples for the earliest memorials of the worship of Buddha. Just now they have found his birthplace and precious relics. But that takes us too far afield, and would tempt us to further excursions in Burmah and China. We must come back to Western Asia and the shores of Europe.

As has been indicated, the greatest puzzle of ancient history is that of the Hittite empire, which seems to have ruled all Asia Minor at some uncertain time, and to have extended over Syria and Palestine. No sooner had the greatest Egyptian kings, Thothmes and Rameses, ventured their armies into Asia, perhaps in vengeance on the incursions of Ionian pirates, perhaps in requital of the tyrannies of the hated Shepherd Kings, than they learned of the Hittites on the shores of the Euphrates. Then, a century or two later, a mass of official correspondence sent by the Kings of Palestine and Syria, dug up in Egypt, reports that the Hittites had appeared as invaders from the north and beseeches military aid. But the power of Egypt had waned, and the Hittites were supreme until the Assyrians began and carried on for five centuries the uncertain war which ended in the utter overthrow of the Hittites and all their allies in a great battle at Carchemish. That great mound of Carchemish needs to be thoroughly explored. Already an English expedition has very carelessly just opened the hill and exposed, but not fairly published, some few as fine friezes as are to be found in the Assyrian capitals, with unread Hittite inscriptions, and a fine statue of the Hittite Venus; but much remains to reward the student of Oriental history and art. At Senjirli a German expedition under Von Luschan has done more and better work, handsomely published, but this was a smaller Syrian town, and less was to be expected; and yet here, and near by, were found what was not expected, steles (upright slabs or pillars) with the portraits of kings in high relief, covered over with long inscriptions in Aramaic, the oldest and longest as yet discovered anywhere in that language. It was a magnificent result of very moderate labor,--Hittite friezes, Assyrian and Aramean inscriptions all in one little mound. But for the most part we know the art and writing of the Hittites from what we have found above ground, in their towns and fortresses in the hills, for little digging has been done. At Pterium was a principal sacred capital, and there, on a natural corridor of rock, they carved a procession of gods and kings and soldiers that excites the wonder of scholars. As I write, the announcement comes that Professor Sayce has at last discovered the secret of the Hittite hieroglyphs, and we may hope that very soon it will be possible to read them. But there is vastly more of their records yet to be disinterred.

And there remain the two lands most sacred and beloved in poetry and history,--the land of Israel and the land of Homer. It is amazing that so little search has been made to find out what is hidden under the soil of Palestine. Scholars in plenty have walked over the top of it, and have told all that is on the surface, but almost nothing has been done underground, no such excavations as in Egypt or Assyria. I do not forget that the English Palestine Exploration Fund has followed out, with trenches and tunnels, the walls of Jerusalem, nor that one or two old mounds have been partly explored. But what is this to the great work that needs to be done? There has been found on the surface the Moabite Stone, at the old capital of Dibon, a wonderful record of early kings mentioned in the Bible. And there is the short account in the rock-cut conduit of Siloam, of the success of the workmen in the time of Hezekiah, who, beginning at the two ends, did the fine engineering feat of having their tunnels meet correctly in the solid rock. But when Jerusalem is fully explored, and the northern capitals of Bethel and Tirzah and Samaria, and a hundred other mounds that mark the site of Jewish, Israelite, Philistine, and Amorite cities, we may expect marvellous discoveries that will illumine our Holy Scriptures.

And one region yet remains to be considered, the scattered coasts and islands that owned the Greek speech, and that created the Greek civilization. It is not the Greece of the Parthenon and Pericles that we wish to discover, for that we fairly know; but the arts and the history of those earlier Greeks and Trojans that Homer tells of, the age of Agamemnon and Ulysses, of Helen and Hector and Priam, and of the yet earlier tribes that sailed the Aegean, and settled the Mediterranean islands, and sent their ships to the Egyptian coasts, and sought golden fleeces on the Euxine Sea. All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived, while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy. What shall we call them? Were they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi? Were they of the same race as the mysterious Etruscans, or shall we name them simply Mycenaeans, as we call the art Mycenaean that ruled the islands and coasts down to the Homeric age, and we know not how many centuries earlier, but certainly as far back as the conquering period of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty of Thothmes? Their soldiers and merchants and their fine vases are pictured on the walls of Egypt, and their pottery has long been studied; but we knew little of them until Dr. Schliemann, the Greek merchant who achieved wealth in the United States, bravely opened the great ruins of Troy, in the full patriotism of his assurance that Homer's story of the Trojan war was history as well as poetry. As he found one burnt and buried city under another,--for many times was Troy destroyed,--and extended his investigations to Tiryns and other ancient cities, one volume of splendid research followed another, until the trader had compelled the unwilling scholar to confess that he must dig for both history and art. To be sure, his interpretations were quite too literal at first, but the whole world of classical scholarship has learned from him the new method of research. Splendid have been the results. If we are not sure which stratum represents the city of Priam, we do learn how the people lived, and how fine was their work in silver and gold, and how slight their knowledge of letters. Dr. Schliemann has now a multitude of imitators. France and Germany and England and the United States each maintain a school of archaeology in Athens, and each conducts careful explorations. Our American School lost to the French, for lack of money at the right time, the chance to explore Delphi, but it has carried on careful explorations at Corinth and other places. How wonderful was the discovery, not long ago, of a shipload of bronze and marble statues wrecked while being transported as spoil of war from Corinth to Rome!

But the most surprising discoveries in the realm of old Greek history and art are those that have been made in these last two or three years in Crete. Crete was a famous centre of ancient Greek legend. Jupiter was born and reared on Mount Ida. From another mountain summit in Crete the gods watched the battle on the plains of Troy. There ruled Minos, who first gave laws to men, and who at his death was sent by the gods to judge the shades as they entered the lower world. There was the famous Labyrinth, and there the Minotaur devoured his annual tale of maidens until he was slain by Theseus. Was there such a real palace of Minos as the Greek poets sung? The magnificent palace of the Cretan kings at Cnossus has been found, by Mr. Evans, with its friezes, its spiral ornaments, its flounce-petticoated women, its treasuries, and its tablets written in a script so old that it cannot yet be read, but which will be read as surely as scholarship leaves none of its riddles unsolved. The childhood of Greece, its mighty infancy, out of which it grew to be the creator and the example of all the world's culture, is even now being exposed to our view, safely kept to be recovered by the scholars of our generation.

Of interest rather to the student of the curiosities of history are the mounds and pyramids and temples built by the aborigines of America; for these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant civilization or developing its art. China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas, have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept. But this does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced. Their arrowheads and hatchets are in every little museum. Their mounds, sometimes shaped like serpents or tortoises or lizards, are scattered over all the central States, and many of them have been carefully explored with scanty results. The cliff-dwellers have left somewhat richer remains, more baskets and parched corn, yet nothing of artistic value. We have to go to Mexico and Yucatan and further south to Peru, to find the majestic capitals of the Mayas and Incas, who had really reached a fair degree of such civilization as stone and copper, without iron, and the beginnings of picture symbols, without letters, could provide. Humboldt and Stephens, and Lord Kingsborough, and Squier, and Tchudi, and Charnay have made explorations and found vast and wonderful cities, some of them deserted and overgrown before Cortez and Pizarro took possession of the lands for Spain and enslaved the people. Where the city of Mexico now stands was a famous capital, from whose ruins were taken the great Calendar stone and the double statue of the god of war and the god of death. In Palenque and Uxmal, capitals of Yucatan, were immense palaces and temples, with the weird ornamentation of Mayan imagination; and equal wonders exist in the high uplands where the Incas ruled Peru. Even their barbaric art and their unrecorded history must be recovered, to satisfy the curiosity of the more fortunate races whose boasted Christianity visited on them nothing better than cruel slaughter. At least we can give them museums and publish magnificent pictures of their ruins.

So we may bless the ashes and sand that seemed to destroy and bury the monuments of the mighty empires of the ancient world, but which have kindly covered and preserved them, just as we put our treasures away in some safety-vault while absent on a long journey. The fire burned the upper wooden walls of the city, and it fell in ruins, but under those ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the most precious records of ancient nations,--retained beyond the reach of vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec and Evans and a hundred other men to dig with their competitive spades. But in all the long list of enthusiasts not one deserves a higher honor or has reaped a richer harvest than Sir Henry Layard.

AUTHORITIES.

Layard: "Early Adventures;" "Nineveh and its Remains;" "Nineveh and Babylon;" "Monuments of Nineveh." Botta: "Monument de Ninive." Loftus: "Chaldea and Susiana." Y. Place: "Ninive et Assyrie." Hilprecht: "Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania;" "Recent Research in Bible Lands." Perrot and Chipiez: "History of Art in Antiquity." J.P. Peters: "Nippur." R.W. Rogers: "History of Babylonia and Assyria." F. Lenormant: "Students' Manual of the Ancient History of the East;" "The Beginnings of History." Maspero: "Dawn of Civilization;" "Struggle of the Nations;" "Passing of the Empires;" "Egyptian Archaeology;" "Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria." C.J. Ball: "Light from the East." Egypt Exploration Fund's Publications. F.J. Bliss: "Exploration in Jerusalem;" "A Mound of Many Cities." Schliemann: "Troy and its Remains;" "Ilios;" "Mycenae;" "Tiryns;" "Troja." A.J. Evans: "Cnossus;" "Cretan Pictographs." Tsountas and Manatt: "The Mycenaean Age."

MICHAEL FARADAY.

1791-1867.

ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM.

BY EDWIN J. HOUSTON, PH.D.

"No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him. There is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will."

LOWELL

A man was born into the world, on the 22d of September, 1791, whose work was born with him, and who did this work so well that he became one of its greatest benefactors. Indeed, much of the marvellous advance made in the electric arts and sciences, during the last half-century, can be directly traced to this work.

It was in Newington Butts, in London, England, that the man-child first opened his eyes on the wonders of the physical world around him. To those eyes, in after years, were given a far deeper insight into the mysteries of nature than often falls to the lot of man. This man-child was Michael Faraday, who has been justly styled, by those best capable of judging him, "The Prince of Experimental Philosophers."

The precocity so common in the childhood of men of genius was apparently absent in the case of young Faraday. The growing boy played marbles, and worried through a scant education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, unnoticed, and most probably, for the greater part, severely left alone, as commonly falls to the lot of nearly all boys, whether ordinary or extraordinary. At the early age of thirteen, he was taken from school and placed on trial as errand-boy in the book-shop of George Ribeau, in London. After a year at this work, he was taken as an apprentice to the book-binding trade, by the same employer, who, on account of his faithful services, remitted the customary premium. At this work he spent some eight years of his life.

But far be it from us even to hint at the absence of genius in the young child. Genius is not an acquired gift. It is born in the individual. Apart from the marvellous achievements of the man, a mere glance at the magnificent head, with its high intellectual forehead, the firm lips, the intelligent inquiring eyes, and the bright face, as seen in existing pictures, assures us that they portray an unusual individuality, incompatible with even a suspicion of belonging to an ordinary man. Doubtless the growing child did give early promise of his future greatness. Doubtless he was a formidable member of that terrible class of inquiring youngsters who demand the why and the wherefore of all around them, and refuse to accept the unsatisfactory belief of their fathers that things "are because they are." In its self-complacency, the busy world is too apt to fail to notice unusual abilities in children,--abilities that perhaps too often remain undeveloped from lack of opportunities. But whether young Faraday did or did not, at an early age, display any unusual promise of his life-work, all his biographers appear to agree that he could not be regarded as a precocious child.

Faraday disclaimed the idea that his childhood was distinguished by any precocity. "Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person," says Faraday, when alluding to his early life. "I was a very lively, imaginative person, and could believe in the 'Arabian Nights' as easily as the 'Encyclopaedia,' but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact and always cross-examined an assertion. So when I questioned Mrs. Marcet's book [he is alluding to her 'Conversations on Chemistry'], by such little experiments as I could find means to perform, and found it true to the facts as I could understand them, I felt that I had got hold of an anchor in chemical knowledge, and clung fast to it."

But while there may be a question as to the existence of precocity in the young lad, there does not appear to be any reason for believing that his unusual abilities were the result of direct heredity. His father, an ordinary journeyman blacksmith, never exhibited any special intellectual ability, though possibly poverty and poor health may have been responsible for this failure. His mother, too, it appears, was of but ordinary mentality.

The environment of those early years--that is, from 1804 to 1813, while in the book-binding business--was far from calculated to develop any marked abilities inherent in our young philosopher. What would seem less calculated to inspire a wish to obtain a deeper insight into the mysteries of the physical world than the trade of book-binding, especially in the case of a boy whose scholastic education ceased at fourteen years and was limited to the mere rudiments of learning? But, fortunately for the world, the inquiring spirit of the lad led him to examine the inside of the books he bound, and thus, by familiarizing himself with their contents, he received the inspiration that good writing is always ready to bestow on those who properly read it. Two books, he afterwards informs us, proved of especial benefit; namely, "Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry," already referred to, and the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." To the former he attributes his grounding in chemistry, and to the latter his first ideas in electricity, in both of which studies he excelled in after years. As we have seen, even at this early age he followed the true plan for the physical investigator, cross-questioned all statements, only admitting those to the dignity of facts whose truth he had established by careful experimentation.

But our future experimental philosopher has not as yet fairly started on the beginnings of his life-work. The possibilities of the book-binding trade were too limited to permit much real progress. A circumstance occurred in the spring of 1812 that shaped his entire after-life. This was the opportunity then afforded him to attend four of the last lectures delivered at the Royal Institution, by the great Sir Humphry Davy. Faraday took copious notes of these lectures, carefully wrote them out, and bound them in a small quarto volume. It was this volume, which he afterwards sent to Davy, that resulted in his receiving, on March 1, 1813, the appointment of laboratory assistant in the Royal Institution. His pay for this work was twenty-five shillings a week, with a lodging on the top floor of the Institute, a very fair compensation for the times.

Very congenial were the duties of the young assistant. They were to keep clean the beloved apparatus of the lecturers, and to assist them in their demonstrations. The new world thus opened was full of bright promise. He keenly felt the deficiencies of his early education, and did his best to extend his learning, so that he might be able to make the most of his opportunities. But what he perhaps appreciated the most was the inspiration he received from the great teacher Davy, who was then Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Laboratory of the Royal Institution; for Faraday assisted at Davy's lectures, and in an humble way even aided his investigations, sharing the dangers arising from the explosion of the unstable substance, chloride of nitrogen, that Davy was then investigating. Faraday has repeatedly acknowledged the debt owed to the inspiration of this teacher. Davy also, in later life generously recognized, in his former assistant, a philosopher greater than himself. As the renowned astronomer, Tycho Brahe, discovered in one of his pupils, John Kepler, an astronomer greater than the master, and as Bergman, the Swedish chemist, in a similar manner, discovered the greater chemist Scheele, so when Davy, in after years, was asked what he regarded as his greatest discovery, he briefly replied, "Michael Faraday."

The task of the scientific historian, who endeavors honestly to record the progress of research, and to trace the influence of the work of some individual on the times in which he lived, is by no means an easy one; for, in scientific work one discovery frequently passes so insensibly into another that it is often difficult to know just where one stops and the other begins, and much difficulty constantly arises as to whom the credit should be given, when, as is too often the case, these discoveries are made by different individuals. It is only when some great discovery stands alone, like a giant mountain peak against the clear sky, that it is comparatively easy to determine the extent and character of its influence on other discoveries, and justly to give the credit to whom the credit is due. Such discoveries form ready points of reference in the intellectual horizon, and mark distinct eras in the world's progress. This is true of all work in the domain of physical science, but it is especially true in that of electricity and magnetism, in which Faraday was pre-eminent. The scope of each of these sciences is so extended, the number of workers so great, and the applications to the practical arts so nearly innumerable, that it is often by no means an easy task correctly to trace their proper growth and development.

Faraday's investigations covered vast fields in the domain of chemistry, electricity, and magnetism. It is to the last two only that reference will here be made. Faraday's life-work in electricity and magnetism began practically in 1831, when he made his immortal discovery of the direct production of electricity from magnetism. His best work in electricity and magnetism was accomplished between 1831 and 1856, extending, therefore, over a period of some twenty-five years, although it is not denied that good work was done since 1856. Consequently, it was at so comparatively recent a date that most of Faraday's work was done that some of the world's distinguished electricians yet live who began their studies during the latter years of Faraday's life. The difficulties of tracing, at least to some extent, the influence that Faraday's masterly investigations have had on the present condition of the electrical arts and sciences will, therefore, be considerably lessened.

The extent of Faraday's researches and discoveries in magnetism and electricity was so great that it will be impossible, in the necessarily limited space of a brief biographical sketch, to notice any but the more prominent. Nor will any attempt be made, except where the nature of the research or discovery appears to render it advisable, to follow any strict chronological order; for, our inquiry here is not so much directed to a mere matter of history as to the influence which the investigation or discovery exerted on the life and civilization of the age in which we live.

There is a single discovery of Faraday that stands out sharply amidst all his other discoveries, great as they were, and is so important in its far-reaching results that it alone would have stamped him as a philosophical investigator of the highest merits, had he never done anything else. This was his discovery of the means for developing electricity directly from magnetism. It was made on the 29th of August, 1831, and should be regarded as inspired by the great discovery made by Oersted in 1820, of the relations existing between the voltaic pile and electro-magnetism. It was in the same year that Ampere had conducted that memorable investigation as to the mutual attractions and repulsions between circuits through which electric currents are flowing, which resulted in a theory of electro-magnetism, and finally led to the production of the electro-magnet itself. Ampere had shown that a coil of wire, or helix, through which an electric current is passing, acted practically as a magnet, and Arago had magnetized an iron bar by placing it within such a helix.

In common with the other scientific men of his time, Faraday believed that since the flow of an electric current invariably produced magnetism, so magnetism should, in its turn, be capable of producing electricity. Many investigators before Faraday's time had endeavored to solve this problem, but it was reserved to Faraday alone to be successful. Since success in this investigation resulted from some experiments he made while endeavoring to obtain inductive action on a quiescent circuit from a neighboring circuit through which an electric current was flowing, we will first briefly examine this experiment. All his experiments in this direction were at first unsuccessful. He passed an electric current through a circuit, which was located close to another circuit containing a galvanometer,--a device for showing the presence of an electric current and measuring its strength,--but failed to obtain any result. He looked for such results only when the current had been fully established in the active circuit. Undismayed by failure, he reasoned that probably effects were present, but that they were too small to be observed owing to the feeble inducing current employed. He therefore increased the strength of the current in the active wire; but still with no results.

Again and again he interrogates nature, but unsuccessfully. At last he notices that there is a slight movement of the galvanometer needle at the moment of making and breaking the circuit. Carefully repeating his experiments in the light of this observation, he discovers the important fact that it is only at the moment a current is increasing or decreasing in strength--at the moment of making or breaking a circuit--that the active circuit is capable of producing a current in a neighboring inactive circuit by induction. This was an important discovery, and in the light of his after-knowledge was correctly regarded as a solution of the production of electricity from magnetism.

Observing that the galvanometer needle momentarily swings in one direction on making the circuit, and in the opposite direction on breaking it, he establishes the fact that the current induced on making flows in the opposite direction to the inducing current, and that induced on breaking flows in the same direction as the inducing current.

Having thus established the fact of current induction, he makes the step of substituting magnets for active circuits; a simple step in the light of our present knowledge, but a giant stride at that time. Remembering that current induction, or, as he called it, voltaic current induction, takes place only while some effect produced by the current is either increasing or decreasing, he moves coils of insulated wire towards or from magnet poles, or magnet poles towards or from coils of wire, and shows that electric currents are generated in the coils while either the coils or the magnets are in motion, but cease to be produced as soon as the motion ceases. Moreover, these magnetically induced currents differ in no respects from other currents,--for example, those produced by the voltaic pile,--since, like the latter, they produce sparks, magnetize bars of steel, or deflect the needle of a galvanometer. In this manner Faraday solved the great problem. He had produced electricity directly from magnetism!

With, perhaps, the single exception of the discovery by Oersted, in 1820, of the invariable relation existing between an electric current and magnetism, this discovery of Faraday may be justly regarded as the greatest in this domain of physical science. These two master minds in scientific research wonderfully complemented each other. Oersted showed that an electric current is invariably attended by magnetic effects; Faraday showed that magnetic changes are invariably attended by electric currents. Before these discoveries, electricity and magnetism were necessarily regarded as separate branches of physical science, and were studied apart as separate phenomena. Now, however, they must be regarded as co-existing phenomena. The ignorance of the scientific world had unwittingly divorced what nature had joined together.

In view of the great importance of Faraday's discovery, we shall be justified in inquiring, though somewhat briefly, into some of the apparatus employed in this historic research. Note its extreme simplicity. In one of his first successful experiments he wraps a coil of insulated wire around the soft iron bar that forms the armature or keeper of a permanent magnet of the horse-shoe type, and connects the ends of this coil to a galvanometer. He discovers that whenever the armature is placed against the magnet poles, and is therefore being rendered magnetic by contact therewith, the deflection of the needle of the galvanometer shows that the coiled wire on the armature is traversed by a current of electricity; that whenever the armature is removed from the magnet poles, and is therefore losing its magnetism, the needle of the galvanometer is again deflected, but now in the opposite direction, showing that an electric current is again flowing through the coiled wire on the armature, but reversed in direction. He notices, too, that these effects take place only while changes are going on in the strength of the magnetism in the armature, or when magnetic flux is passing through the coils; for, the galvanometer needle comes to rest, and remains at rest as long as the contact between the armature and the poles remains unbroken.

In another experiment he employs a simple hollow coil, or helix, of insulated wire whose ends are connected with a galvanometer. On suddenly thrusting one end of a straight cylindrical magnet into the axis of the helix, the deflection of the galvanometer needle showed the presence of an electric current in the helix. The magnet being left in the helix, the galvanometer needle came to rest, thus showing the absence of current. When the bar magnet was suddenly withdrawn from the helix, the galvanometer needle was again deflected, but now in the opposite direction, showing that the direction of the current in the helix had been reversed.

The preceding are but some of the results that Faraday obtained by means of his experimental researches in the direct production of electricity from magnetism. Let us now briefly examine just what he was doing, and the means whereby he obtained electric currents from magnetism. We will consider this question from the views of the present time, rather than from those of Faraday, although the difference between the two are in most respects immaterial.

Faraday knew that the space or region around a magnet is permeated or traversed by what he called magnetic curves, or lines of magnetic force. These lines are still called "lines of magnetic force," or by some "magnetic streamings" "magnetic flux," or simply "magnetism." They are invisible, though their presence is readily manifested by means of iron filings. They are present in every magnet, and although we do not know in what direction they move, yet in order to speak definitely about them, it is agreed to assume that they pass out of every magnet at its north-seeking pole (or the pole which would point to the magnetic north, were the magnet free to move as a needle), and, after having traversed the space surrounding the magnet, reenter at its south-seeking pole, thus completing what is called the magnetic circuit. Any space traversed by lines of magnetic force is called a magnetic field.

But it is not only a magnet that is thus surrounded by lines of magnetic force, or by ether streamings. The same is true of any conductor through which an electric current is flowing, and their presence may be shown by means of iron filings. If an active conductor--a conductor conveying an electric current, as, for example, a copper wire--be passed vertically through a piece of card-board, or a glass plate, iron filings dusted on the card or plate will arrange themselves in concentric circles around the axis of the wire. It requires an expenditure of energy both to set up and to maintain these lines of force. It is the interaction of their lines of force that causes the attractions and repulsions in active movable conductors. These lines of magnetic force act on magnetic needles like other lines of magnetic force and tend to set movable magnetic needles at right angles to the conducting wire.

The setting up of an electric current in a conducting wire is, therefore, equivalent to the setting up of concentric magnetic whirls around the axis of the wire, and anything that can do this will produce an electric current. For example, if an inactive conducting wire is moved through a magnetic field; it will have concentric circular whirls set up around it; or, in other words, it will have a current generated in it as a result of such motion. But to set up these whirls it is not enough that the conducting wire be moved along the lines of force in the field. In such a case no whirls are produced around the conductor. The conductor must be moved so as to cut or pass through the lines of magnetic force. Just what the mechanism is by means of which the cutting of the lines of force by the conductor produces the circular magnetic whirls around it, no man knows any more than he knows just what electricity is; but this much we do know,--that to produce the circular whirls or currents in a previously inactive conductor, the lines of force of some already existing magnetic field must be caused to pass through the conductor, and that the strength of the current so produced is proportional to the number of lines of magnetic force cut in a given time, say, per second; or, in other words, is directly proportional to the strength of the magnetic field, and to the velocity and length of the moving conductor.

Or, briefly recapitulating: Oersted showed that an electric current, passed through a conducting circuit, sets up concentric circular whirls around its axis; that is, an electric current invariably produces magnetism; Faraday showed, that if the lines of magnetic force, or magnetism, be caused to cut or pass through an inactive conductor, concentric circular whirls will be set up around the conductor; that is, lines of magnetic force passed across a conductor invariably set up an electric current in that conductor.

The wonderful completeness of Faraday's researches into the production of electricity from magnetism may be inferred from the fact that all the forms of magneto-electric induction known to-day--namely, self-induction, or the induction of an active circuit on itself; mutual induction, or the induction of an active circuit on a neighboring circuit; and electro-magnetic induction, and magneto-electric induction, or the induction produced in conductors through which the magnetic flux from electro and permanent magnets respectively is caused to pass--were discovered and investigated by him. Nor were these investigations carried on in the haphazard, blundering, groping manner that unfortunately too often characterizes the explorer in a strange country; on the contrary, they were singularly clear and direct, showing how complete the mastery the great investigator had over the subject he was studying. It is true that repeated failures frequently met him, but despite discouragements and disappointments he continued until he had entirely traversed the length and breadth of the unknown region he was the first to explore.

Let us now briefly examine Faraday's many remaining discoveries and inventions. Though none of these were equal to his great discovery, yet many were exceedingly valuable. Some were almost immediately utilized; some waited many years for utilization; and some have never yet been utilized. We must avoid, however, falling into the common mistake of holding in little esteem those parts of Faraday's work that did not immediately result either in the production of practical apparatus, or in valuable applications in the arts and sciences, or those which have not even yet proved fruitful. Some discoveries and devices are so far ahead of the times in which they are produced that several lifetimes often pass before the world is ready to utilize them. Like immature or unripe fruit, they are apt to die an untimely death, and it sometimes curiously happens that, several generations after their birth, a subsequent inventor or discoverer, in honest ignorance of their prior existence, offers them to the world as absolutely new. The times being ripe, they pass into immediate and extended public use, so that the later inventor is given all the credit of an original discovery, and the true first and original inventor remains unrecognized.

We will first examine Faraday's discovery of the relations existing between light and magnetism. Though the discovery has not as yet borne fruit in any direct practical application, yet it has proved of immense value from a theoretical standpoint. In this investigation Faraday proved that light-vibrations are rotated by the action of a magnetic field. He employed the light of an ordinary Argand lamp, and polarized it by reflection from a glass surface. He caused this polarized light to pass through a plate of heavy glass made from a boro-silicate of lead. Under ordinary circumstances this substance exerted no unusual action on light, but when it was placed between the poles of a powerful electro-magnet, and the light was passed through it in the same direction as the magnetic flux, the plane of polarization of the light was rotated in a certain direction.

Faraday discovered that other solid substances besides glass exert a similar action on a beam of polarized light. Even opaque solids like iron possess this property. Kerr has proved that a beam of light passed through an extremely thin plate of highly magnetic iron has its plane of polarization slightly rotated. Faraday showed that the power of rotating a beam of polarized light is also possessed by some liquids. But what is most interesting, in both solids and liquids, is that the direction of the rotation of the light depends on the direction in which the magnetism is passing, and can, therefore, be changed by changing the polarity of the electro-magnet.