"'That P will change to F in the British tongue is true (Quoth Professor Phillips), though the instances are few;' An entry in my journal then I ventured thus to parody, 'I this day dined with Fillips, where I hobbed and nobbed with Pharaday.' "T. T. "OXFORD, _June 27, 1860_." At the Liverpool meeting, in 1837, he was president of the Chemical Section, and on two other occasions he was selected to deliver the evening lecture, but though repeatedly pressed to undertake the presidency of the whole body, he could not be prevailed upon to accept the office. My first personal intercourse with him, of any extent, was at the Ipswich meeting in 1851. I watched him with all the interest of an admiring disciple, and there is deeply engraven on my memory the vivacity of his conversation, the eagerness with which he entered into some mathematico-chemical speculations of Dumas, and the playfulness with which, when we were dining together, he cut boomerangs out of card, and shot them across the table at his friends. Professional engagements also took him not unfrequently into the country. Some of these will be described in the later sections, that treat of his mode of working and its valuable results. To comprehend a man's life it is necessary to know not merely what he does, but also what he purposely leaves undone. There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, from among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolutely follows the best. Faraday took no part in any of the political or social movements of his time. To politics indeed he seems to have been really indifferent. It was during the intensely interesting period of 1814-15 that he was on the Continent with Davy, but he alludes to the taking of Paris by the allied troops simply because of its bearing on the movements of the travellers, and on March 7, 1815, he made his remarkable entry in his journal: "I heard for news that Bonaparte was again at liberty. Being no politician, I did not trouble myself much about it, though I suppose it will have a strong influence on the affairs of Europe." In later days he seems to have awaked to sufficient interest to read the debates, and to show a Conservative tendency; he became a special constable in 1848, and was disposed generally to support "the powers that be,"--though that involved some perplexity at a change of Government.