His comparative aloofness from scientific organisations arose probably from the exceedingly individual nature of his own researches--to which allusion was made on p. 242--rather than from any lack of sympathy. He had no jealousy of co-operation in science. To Tyndall, then at Marburg, he wrote in 1850 rejoicing at the circumstance that the work on the magnetic properties of crystals was being taken up by others. “It is wonderful,” he says, “how much good results from different persons working at the same matter. Each one gives views and ideas new to the rest. When science is a republic, then it gains; and though I am no republican in other matters, I am in that.” Other causes there were, doubtless, tending to his isolation, amongst them an old jealousy, now long dead, against the Royal Institution on the part of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Above all, probably, was his detestation of controversy. [Sidenote: PRIORITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.] [Sidenote: PRIORITY IN PUBLICATION.] Priority in scientific discovery was a matter which deeply concerned one whose life was devoted to scientific pioneering. To any question as to scientific priority between himself and other workers he was keenly sensitive. This was, indeed, natural in one who had voluntarily relinquished fortune, and retired from lucrative professional work, in the sole and single aim of advancing natural knowledge. His single-minded and sensitive nature made him particularly scrupulous in all such matters, and his early experiences must have added to the almost excessive keenness of his perceptions. Having had in 1823, when still merely assistant to Davy, to bear the double burden of a serious misunderstanding with Dr. Wollaston as to the originality of his discovery of the electro-magnetic rotations, and of a serious estrangement from his master arising out of the liquid chlorine discovery--an estrangement which threatened to cause his election to the Royal Society to be indefinitely postponed--he was in later life especially precise in dating and publishing his own researches. In 1831 there arose, concerning his great discovery of magneto-electric induction, a curious misunderstanding. His discovery was, as we have seen, made in September and October. He collected his results and arranged them in the splendid memoir--the first in the series of “Experimental Researches in Electricity”--which was read at the Royal Society on November 24th. The _résumé_ of his work, which he wrote five days later to Phillips, is given on pages 114–117. A fortnight later he wrote a shorter and hasty letter in the same way to his friend, M. Hachette of Paris--a letter which Faraday subsequently well termed “unfortunate,” in view of the consequences that followed. M. Hachette, a week later, communicated Faraday’s letter to the Académie des Sciences on December 26th. It was published in _Le Temps_ of December 28th. At that date the complete memoir read to