Faraday to John Barlow   1846¹

I see no objection to evening lectures if you can find a fit man to give them. As to popular lectures (which at the same time are to be respectable and sound), none are more difficult to find. Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach. They know little of the matter who think science is more easily to be taught or learned than A B C; and yet who ever learned his A B C without pain and trouble? Still lectures can (generally) inform the mind, and show forth to the attentive man what he really has to learn, and in their way are very useful, especially to the public. I think they might be useful to us now, even if they only gave an answer to those who, judging by their own earnest desire to learn, think much of them. As to agricultural chemistry, it is no doubt an excellent and popular subject, but I rather suspect that those who know least of it think that most is known about it.