A peculiar interest attaches to Faraday’s attitude towards the study of mathematics. He who had never had any schooling beyond the common school of his parish had not advanced beyond the simplest algebra in his mastery over symbolic reasoning. Several times in his “Experimental Researches” he deplores what he termed “my imperfect mathematical knowledge.” Of Poisson’s theory of magnetism he said: “I am quite unfit to form a judgment.” Dr. Scoffern repeats a pleasantry of Faraday’s having on a certain occasion boasted that he had once in the course of his life performed a mathematical operation--when he turned the handle of Babbage’s calculating machine. Certain it is that he went through the whole of his magnificent researches without once using even a sine or a cosine, or anything more recondite than the simple rule-of-three. He expressed the same kind of regret at his unfamiliarity with the German language--“the language of science and knowledge,” as he termed it in writing to Du Bois Reymond--which prevented him from reading the works of Professor “Ohms.” Nevertheless he valued the mathematical powers of others, and counselled Tyndall to work out his experimental results, “so that the mathematicians may be able to take it up.” Yet he never relaxed his preference for proceeding along the lines of experimental investigation. His curious phrase (p. 239) as to his pique respecting mathematics is very significant, as is also his note of jubilation in his letter to Phillips (p. 117) at finding that pure experiment can successfully rival mathematics in unravelling the mysteries which had eluded the efforts of Poisson and Arago. He himself attributed to his defective memory his want of hold upon symbolic reasoning. To Tyndall he wrote in 1851, when thanking him for a copy of one of his scientific memoirs:-- Such papers as yours make me feel more than ever the loss of memory I have sustained, for there is no reading them, or at least retaining the argument, under such deficiency. Mathematical formulæ more than anything require quickness and surety in receiving and retaining the true value of the symbols used; and when one has to look back at every moment to the beginning of a paper, to see what H or A or B mean, there is no making way. Still, though I cannot hold the whole train of reasoning in my mind at once, I am able fully to appreciate the value of the results you arrive at, and it appears to me that they are exceedingly well established and of very great consequence. These elementary laws of action are of so much consequence in the development of the nature of a power which, like magnetism, is as yet new to us. Again to Clerk Maxwell, in 1857, he wrote:--