This journal he kept with minute care, with the sole purpose of recalling events to his mind. It gives full details as to Davy’s scientific friends and work, intermingled with graphic descriptions of scenery; and is remarkable also for its personal reticence. As with many another, so with Faraday, foreign travel took in his life the place of residence at a University. In France, in Italy, he received enlarged ideas; and what he saw of learned men and academies of science exercised no small formative effect upon one then at the most impressionable age. He comments gaily on the odd incidents of travel; the luminescence of the sea at night; the amazing fuss at the Custom House; the postilion with his jack-boots, whip, and pouch; the glow-worm (the first glow-worm he had ever seen); and the slim pigs of Normandy. At Paris he visits the Louvre, where his chief comment on its treasures is, that by their acquisition France has made herself “a nation of thieves.” He goes to the Prefecture of Police for his passport, in which he is described as having “a round chin, a brown beard, a large mouth, a great nose,” etc. He visits the churches, where the theatrical air pervading the place “makes it impossible to attach a serious or important feeling to what is going on.” He comments on the wood fires, the charcoal used in cooking, the washerwomen on the river bank, the internal decorations of houses, the printing of the books. Then he goes about with Davy amongst the French chemists. Ampère, Clément, and Désormes come to Davy to show him the new and strange substance “X,” lately discovered by M. Courtois. They heat it, and behold it rise in vapour of a beautiful violet colour. Ampère himself, on November 23rd, gives Davy a specimen. They carefully note down its characters. Davy and his assistant make many new experiments on it. At first its origin is kept a profound secret by the Frenchman. Then it transpires that it is made from ashes of seaweed. They work on it at Chevreul’s laboratory. Faraday borrows a voltaic pile from Chevreul. With that intuition which was characteristic of him, Davy jumps almost at once to a conclusion as to the nature of the new body, which for nearly two years had been in the hands of the Frenchmen awaiting elucidation. When he leaves Paris, they do not wholly bless his rapidity of thought. But Faraday has seen--with placid indifference--a glimpse of the great Napoleon “sitting in one corner of his carriage, covered and almost hidden by an enormous robe of ermine, and his face overshadowed by a tremendous plume of feathers, that descended from a velvet hat”; he has also met Humboldt, and he has heard M. Gay Lussac lecture to about two hundred pupils. Dumas has recorded in his “Éloge Historique” a reflection of the impressions left by the travellers. After speaking of the criticism to which Davy was exposed during his visit, he says:--