Earlier in his career, Faraday and his brother-in-law used to enjoy conversaziones of artists, actors, and musicians at Hullmandel’s. Sometimes they went up the river in Hullmandel’s eight-oar boat, camping gipsy-wise on the banks for dinner, and enjoying the singing of Signor Garcia and his wife and of his daughter, afterwards Madame Malibran. From these things, too, he withdrew very largely when he ceased to dine out, though he still liked to hear the opera and to visit the theatre. Curiously enough, he seems to have had very little in common with literary men. In the last half of the previous century there had been many intimate relations between the leaders of literature and those of science. The circle which included Watt, Boulton, and Wedgwood included also Priestley and Erasmus Darwin. In our own time the names of Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, and Tyndall are to be found in conjunction with those of Tennyson, Browning, and Jowett. But the biographies of literary men and artists of the period from 1830 to 1850 bear few references to Faraday. He moved in his own world, and that a world very much apart from literature or art. In his method of working he was indeed an artist, often feeling his way rather than calculating it, and arriving at his conclusions by what seemed insight rather than by any direct process of reasoning. The discovery of truth comes about in many ways; and if Faraday’s method in science was artistic rather than scientific, it was amply justified by the brilliant harvest of discoveries which it enabled him to reap. As is well known, Faraday never took out any patents for his discoveries; indeed, whenever in his investigations he seemed to come near to the point where they began to possess a marketable value from their application to the industries, he left them, to pursue his pioneering inquiries in other branches. He sought, indeed, for principles rather than for processes, for facts new to science rather than for merchantable inventions. When he had made the discovery of magneto-electric induction--the basis of all modern electric engineering--he carried the research to the point of constructing several experimental machines, and then abruptly turned away with these memorable words:-- I have rather, however, been desirous of discovering new facts and new relations dependent on magneto-electric induction than of exalting the force of those already obtained; being assured that the latter would find their full development hereafter. [Sidenote: PRACTICAL UTILITIES.] Several times was Faraday known, when asked about the possible utility of some new scientific discovery, to quote Franklin’s rejoinder: “What is the use of a baby?”