There is one thing I would be glad to ask you. When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulæ? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as we to express them so--translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we also might work upon them by experiment? I think it must be so, because I have always found that you could convey to me a perfectly clear idea of your conclusions, which, though they may give me no full understanding of the steps of your process, gave me the results neither above nor below the truth, and so clear in character that I can think and work from them. If this be possible, would it not be a good thing if mathematicians, writing on these subjects, were to give us their results in this popular useful working state as well as in that which is their own and proper to them? The achievement of Faraday in finding for the expression of electromagnetic laws means which, though not symbolic, were simple, accurate, and in advance of the mathematics of his time, has been alluded to on page 217. Liebig, in his discourse on “Induction and Deduction,” refers to Faraday thus:-- I have heard mathematical physicists deplore that Faraday’s records of his labours were difficult to read and understand, that they often resembled rather abstracts from a diary. But the fault was theirs, not Faraday’s. To physicists who have approached physics by the road of chemistry, Faraday’s memoirs sound like an admirably beautiful music. [Sidenote: MAXWELL AND VON HELMHOLTZ.] Von Helmholtz, in his Faraday lecture of 1881, has also touched on this aspect. Now that the mathematical interpretation of Faraday’s conceptions regarding the nature of electric and magnetic forces has been given by Clerk Maxwell, we see how great a degree of exactness and precision was really hidden behind the words which to Faraday’s contemporaries appeared either vague or obscure; and it is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula. Two other passages from Von Helmholtz are worthy of being added:--