We have it on the authority of Sir Roderick Murchison that Faraday's first lecture at the Royal Institution was delivered in the following circumstances. Brande, who had succeeded Sir Humphry Davy as the Professor of Chemistry, was delivering a course of lectures; one day the lecturer, owing to illness or some other cause, was absent, but his assistant (Faraday) took his place, and lectured with so much ease that he won the complete approval of his audience. In this connection too, it is interesting to note that it was towards the close of this same year that Faraday began his experiments in magnetic electricity, the particular branch of research which was to occupy a great part of his later life, and in which he was destined to make some of his most brilliant discoveries. [Illustration: THE LABORATORY, ROYAL INSTITUTION.] It is pleasing to find that whatever may have been Davy's object in opposing Faraday's election into the Royal Society, he did not bear him any continued ill-will; this is shown us not only by Davy's expressions of goodwill in his letters, but by such things as an entry in the minutes of a meeting of the managers of the Royal Institution in February, 1825. From this entry we learn that Sir Humphry Davy, "having stated that he considered the talents and services of Mr. Faraday, assistant in the laboratory, entitled to some mark of approbation from the managers, and these sentiments having met the cordial concurrence of the board; _Resolved_:--That Mr. Faraday be appointed Director of the Laboratory, under the superintendence of the Professor of Chemistry." It was after receiving this appointment that Faraday occasionally invited members of the Institution to evening meetings in the laboratory, when he generally had something new and interesting to show them. In these meetings in the laboratory was the origin of those regular Friday evening meetings in the theatre, which commenced in 1826, which have had for many years a world-wide reputation, and which have drawn together, week after week and year after year, large numbers of persons interested in science and in its popular exposition. In 1826, the year in which the first regular Friday evening meetings took place, seventeen lectures were delivered, six of them being given by Faraday himself, on such a variety of subjects as "Caoutchouc," "Lithography," "Brunel's Tunnel at Rotherhithe," etc. His aim in inaugurating these "Friday evenings" may be gathered from the scanty notes which he made for introducing one of the earliest of the lectures:--"Evening opportunities--interesting, amusing; instructive also:--scientific research--abstract reasoning, but in a popular way--dignity;--facilitate our object of attracting the world, and making ourselves with science attractive to it."