CHAPTER II - 1841–1844. To ÆT. 53

Summary

1841.ÆT.49–50.

Loss of memory and giddiness had long, occasionally, troubled Faraday, and obliged him to stop his work. But now they entirely put an end to all his experiments. For four years, with the exception of an inquiry into the cause of the electricity produced by a jet of steam, no experimental researches in electricity were made. For a year he rested almost entirely, he gave no lectures, and he went for three months to Switzerland. After a, year he began again to work for the Institution, and when he did go on with his researches, he returned to the liquefaction of the gases.

In different ways he showed much of his character during this period of rest. The journal he kept of his Swiss tour is full of kindness, and gentleness, and beauty. It shows his excessive neatness. It has the different mountain flowers which he gathered in his walks fixed in it, as few but Faraday himself could have fixed them. His letters are free from the slightest sign of mental disease. His only illness was overwork, and his only remedy was rest.

Almost the only work he did in 1841 was for the Trinity House. For the Royal Institution he did all he could; he gave the Juvenile Lectures at Christmas on chemistry.

On February 2, he went down to St. Catherine's lighthouse in the Isle of Wight, to remedy the condensation of moisture on the glass in the inside.