Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/255

Rh between the sun, the planets, and their satellites. It is known how, with much caution and even reluctance. Sir Isaac Newton himself proposed his grand hypothesis, which was destined to become the first great and imposing example, illustrating the power of true scientific method.

But then came Oerstedt's discovery of the motions of magnets under the influence of electric currents. The force acting in these phenomena had a new and very singular character. It seemed as if it would drive a single isolated pole of a magnet in a circle around the wire conducting the current, on and on without end, never coming to rest. Faraday saw that a motion of this kind could not be produced by any force of attraction or repulsion, working from point to point. If the current is able to increase the velocity of the magnet, the magnet must react on the current. So he made the experiment, and discovered induced currents; he traced them out through all the various conditions under which they ought to appear. He concluded that somewhere in a part of the space traversed by magnetic force there exists a peculiar state of tension, and that every change of this tension produces electro-motive force. This unknown hypothetical state he called provisionally the electrotonic state, and he was occupied for years and years in finding out what was this electrotonic state. He discovered at first, in 1838, the dielectric polarization of electric insulators, subject to electric forces. Such bodies show, under the influence of electric forces, phenomena perfectly analogous to those exhibited by soft iron under the influence of the magnetic force. Eleven years later, in 1849, he was able to demonstrate that all ponderable matter is magnetized under the influence of sufficiently intense magnetic force, and at the same time he discovered the phenomena of diamagnetism, which indicated that even space, devoid of all ponderable matter, is magnetizable; and now, with quite a wonderful sagacity and intellectual precision, Faraday performed in his brain the work of a great mathematician without using a single mathematical formula. He saw with his mind's eye that, by these systems of tensions and pressures produced by the dielectric and magnetic polarization of space which surrounds electrified bodies, magnets or wires conducting electric currents, all the phenomena of electro-static, magnetic, electro-magnetic attraction, repulsion, and induction could be explained, without recurring at all to forces acting directly at a distance. This was the part of his path where so few could follow him; perhaps a Clerk Maxwell, a second man of the same power and independence of intellect, was necessary to reconstruct in the normal methods of science the great building, the plan of which Faraday had conceived in his mind and attempted to make visible to his contemporaries.

Nevertheless, the adherents of direct action at a distance have not yet ceased to search for solutions of the electro-magnetic problem. The present development of science, however, shows, as I think, a