give a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution will begin his preparations five or six months beforehand. At least one instance is known--the occasion being a discourse by the late Mr. Warren De la Rue--where the preparations were begun more than a year beforehand, and cost several hundreds of pounds. And this was to illustrate a research already made and completed, of which the bare scientific results had already been communicated in a memoir to the Royal Society. A mere enumeration of the eminent men who have thus given their time and labours to the Royal Institution would fill many pages. It is little cause for wonder then that the lecture-theatre at Albemarle Street is crowded week after week in the pursuit of science under conditions like these; or that every lecturer is spurred on by the spirit of the place to do his subject the utmost justice by the manner in which he handles it. There are no lectures so famous, in the best sense of the word so popular, certainly none sustained at so high a level, as the lectures of the Royal Institution. [Sidenote: THE FAMOUS LECTURES.] But it was not always thus. Davy’s brilliant but ill-balanced genius had drawn fashionable crowds to the morning lectures which he gave. Brande proved to be a much more humdrum lecturer; and though with young Faraday at his elbow he found his work of lecturing a task “on velvet,” he was not exactly an inspiring person. During Davy’s protracted tour abroad things had not altogether prospered, and his return was none too soon. Faraday threw himself whole-heartedly into the work of the Institution, not only helping as lecture assistant, but giving a hand also in the preparation of the _Quarterly Journal of Science_, which had been established as a kind of journal of proceedings. But now Faraday was to take a quiet step forward. He appears at the City Philosophical Society in the character of lecturer. He gave seven lectures there, in 1816, on chemistry, the fourth of them being “On Radiant Matter.” Extracts are given from most of these lectures in Bence Jones’s “Life and Letters of Faraday”; they show all that love of accuracy, that philosophic suspense of judgment in matters of hypothesis, which in after years were so characteristic of the man. He also kept a commonplace book filled with notes of scientific matters, with literary excerpts, anagrams, epitaphs, algebraic puzzles, varieties of spelling of his own name, and personal experiences, including a poetical diatribe against falling in love, together with the following more prosaic aphorism:-- What is Love?--A nuisance to everybody but the parties concerned. A private affair which every one but those concerned wishes to make public. It also includes a piece in verse, by a member of the City Philosophical Society--a Mr. Dryden--called “Quarterly Night,” which is interesting as embalming a portrait of the youthful Faraday as he appeared to his comrades:--