abolished this idea of polar attraction, he proceeds to enunciate
and develop a theory of his own. He refers to Davy's celebrated Bakerian
Lecture, given in 1806, which he says 'is almost entirely occupied in
the consideration of electrochemical decompositions.' The facts recorded
in that lecture Faraday regards as of the utmost value. But 'the mode
of action by which the effects take place is stated very generally;
so generally, indeed, that probably a dozen precise schemes of
electrochemical action might be drawn up, differing essentially from
each other, yet all agreeing with the statement there given.'

It appears to me that these words might with justice be applied to
Faraday's own researches at this time. They furnish us with results of
permanent value; but little help can be found in the theory advanced
to account for them. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that
the theory itself is hardly presentable in any tangible form to the
intellect. Faraday looks, and rightly looks, into the heart of the
decomposing body itself; he sees, and rightly sees, active within it
the forces which produce the decomposition, and he rejects, and rightly
rejects, the notion of external attraction; but beyond the hypothesis of
decompositions and recompositions, enunciated and developed by Grothuss
and Davy, he does not, I think, help us to any definite conception as
to how the force reaches the decomposing mass and acts within it. Nor,
indeed, can this be done, until we know the true physical process which
underlies what we call an electric current.

Faraday conceives of that current as 'an axis of power having contrary
forces exactly equal in amount in opposite directions'; but this
definition, though much quoted and circulated, teaches us nothing
regarding the current. An 'axis' here can only mean a direction; and
what we want to be able to conceive of is, not the axis along which the
power acts, but the nature and mode of action of the power itself. He
objects to the vagueness of De la Rive; but the fact is, that both
he and De la Rive labour under the same difficulty. Neither wishes
to commit himself to the notion of a current compounded of two
electricities flowing in two opposite directions: but the time had
not come, nor is it yet come, for the displacement of this provisional
fiction by the true mechanical conception. Still, however indistinct the
theoretic notions of Faraday at this time may be, the facts which are
ri