William Whewell to Faraday   6 December 1848

Trin. Lodge, Cambridge | Dec. 6, 1848

My dear Sir

I return the memoirs1 which you were kind enough to lend me. I hope I have not put you to inconvenience by keeping them so long. I did not hear you speak of the second of the two memoirs2. I should be glad to know how far you agree with him in his criticisms that the diamagnetic force is never polar - that the magnetic and diamagnetic force may coexist in the same body, and the like. I conceive that he refers the phenomena too exclusively to the poles of the magnet in speaking, as he does, of the one force diminishing faster than the other. The phenomena described in this second memoir are in many respects like yours with crystals.

I think I must settle at once to give you my lecture on the 19th3 rather than on the 26th[.]

Believe me always | Truly yours | W. Whewell

M. Faraday Esq

1
Plücker (1847a, b).
2
Faraday had only referred to Plücker (1847a) in letter 2118.
3
See Athenaeum, 3 February 1849, pp.119-20 for an account of Whewell's Friday Evening Discourse of 19 January 1849 "On the Idea of Polarity". For a discussion of this lecture see Schaffer (1991), 229-30.

Bibliography

SCHAFFER, Simon (1991): “The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell's Politics of Language” in Fisch and Schaffer (1991), 201-31.

Please cite as “Faraday2131,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 13 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday2131