In the year 1831, which witnessed this masterpiece of scientific research, Faraday was busy in many other ways. He was still undertaking chemical analyses and expert work for fees, as witness his letter to Phillips on p. 62. He was also, until November, on the Council of the Royal Society. To the “Philosophical Transactions” he contributed a paper “On Vibrating Surfaces,” in which he solved a problem in acoustics which had previously gone without explanation. It had long been known that in the experiments of obtaining the patterns called “Chladni’s figures,” by strewing powders upon vibrating plates, while the heavier powders, such as sand, moved into the nodal lines, lighter substances, such as lycopodium dust, collected in little circular heaps over the parts where the vibration was most energetic. Faraday’s explanation was that these lighter powders were caught and whirled about in little vortices which formed themselves at spots where the motions were of greatest amplitude. He also wrote a paper “On a Peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions,” dealing with the illusions that result from the eye being shown in successive glimpses, as between the teeth of a revolving wheel, different views of a moving body. This research was, in effect, the starting point of a whole line of optical toys, beginning with the phenakistiscope or stroboscope, which developed through the zoetrope and praxino-scope into the kinematograph and animatograph of recent date. [Sidenote: LECTURES ON PHYSICAL SUBJECTS.] He gave four afternoon lectures at the Royal Institution and five Friday evening discourses. These were on optical deceptions, on light and phosphorescence, being an account of experiments recently made by Mr. Pearsall, chemical assistant in the Institution; on oxalamide, then recently discovered by M. Dumas; on Trevelyan’s experiments about the production of sound by heated bodies; and on the arrangements assumed by particles upon vibrating surfaces.