Faraday's results were described in papers afterwards incorporated in his first series of "Experimental Researches," which were read before the Royal Society, November 24th, 1841. These papers probably contain the best possible proof of Faraday's genius as an experimentalist and a leader in scientific observation. Within a few months after his first successful experiment, he had succeeded in bringing to perfection the whole doctrine of induction by currents and magnets, had laid down the fundamental ideas which were to constitute the formal basis of electro-magnetism for all time. Perhaps no better idea of the importance of the discovery thus made by Faraday can be given than will be found in Clerk Maxwell's compendious paragraph on this subject, in his sketch of Faraday, in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be said that no one in all the nineteenth century was more capable of appreciating properly the value of Faraday's work than this great electrical mathematician, who laid the firm foundation of mathematical electricity during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Clerk Maxwell says: "This was of course a great triumph, and nobody appreciated this fact better than Faraday himself, who had been working at its problems for many years. One of the first problems that he had set himself in his note-book as a young man, was 'to convert magnetism into electricity,' and this he had now done. Within a month of the time that his first successful experiment was formed, he succeeded in obtaining induction currents by means of the earth's magnetism. Within a year he took the further immense step of obtaining a spark from the induced current. This would ordinarily have seemed quite impossible, since sparks occur only if the electromotive force is very high, and it was very low in his induced currents. He found, however, that if the circuit of wire in which a current was flowing is broken while the current is passing, a little bridge of metallic vapor is formed, across which the spark leaps. The difficulty with the experiment was to break the circuit during the extremely short period while the current is flowing. Faraday succeeded in doing this, and as a result obtained the first germ of the electric light. When he demonstrated this experiment by a very ingenious apparatus at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, all were deeply interested, yet probably no one, even the most sanguine of the scientists present, thought for a moment that they saw the beginning of a far-reaching revolution of all the lighting of the world."