Probably the best summary of Faraday's work on induction and its significance has been given us by Clerk Maxwell, in his article on Faraday, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. There is no doubt but that Maxwell, above all men of the nineteenth century, was in a position to judge of the meaning of Faraday's work. He was not the sort of a man to say things in a panegyric mood, and his article on Faraday is indeed a model of well-considered judgment and critical illumination. Summing up the significance not only of Faraday's great discovery of induction, but also his theory in explanation of that discovery, he does not hesitate to say that his (Faraday's) opinion is the nearest approach to truth that has been advanced in this much-discussed subject. "After nearly half a century of labor of this kind, we may say that, though the practical applications of Faraday's great discovery have increased and are increasing in number and value every year, no exception to the statement of these laws as given by Faraday has been discovered; no new law has been added to them; and Faraday's original statement remains to this day the only one which asserts no more than can be verified by experiment, and the only one by which the theory of the phenomena can be expressed in a manner which is actually and numerically accurate, and at the same time within the range of elementary methods of exposition." With what eminent care and absolute truth Faraday's conclusions were reached may be judged from some further expressions of Clerk Maxwell's in the article just quoted, with regard to the attitude of certain mathematicians toward Faraday's work. In this matter, Clerk Maxwell, in talking on a theme that he had made especially his own, and in which his opinion must carry the greatest possible weight, said: "Up to the present time, the mathematicians who have rejected Faraday's method of stating his law as unworthy of the precision of their science, have never succeeded in devising any essentially different formula which shall fully express the phenomena, without introducing the hypotheses about the mutual action of things which have no physical existence, such as elements of currents, which flow out of nothing, then along the wire, and finally sink into nothing again."