Faraday to Christian Friedrich Schoenbein   15 December 1848

Royal Institution | 15, Decr. 1848

My dear Schoenbein

What a delight it is to think that you are quietly & philosophically at work in the pursuit of science; - or else are enjoying yourself with Madame Schoenbein & the children amongst the pure & harmonious beauties of nature - rather than fighting amongst the crowd of black passions & motives that seem now a days to urge men every where into action. What miserable scenes every where, what unworthy motives ruled for the moment under high sounding phrases and at the last what disgusting revolutions¹. Happy are we here who have thus far been kept from these things & hope to be so preserved in the future[.]

Your last letter was quite a treat². I cannot tell when it came for my memory is worse than ever and it happens to have no date. The condition of Silver is indeed very curious - indeed the longer you work at this subject the more unexpected your results are and I cannot doubt that you will some day soon have them all opening out & taking their respective places in one consistent bright & beautiful whole.

I have been working also a little & have sent two papers to the Royal Society on the Crystalline Polarity of bismuth & other bodies & its relation to the Magnetic force³. A crystal of bismuth is subject to the action of the Magnet for there is one direction through it which always tends to place itself in the Magnetic axis. This direction I have called the Magnecrystallic axis of the crystal. It makes the crystal point as a magnetic needle would point yet is the result not an effect of attraction or repulsion or polarity for the bismuth is repelled as diamagnetic body as much & no more than if it had not this set. If it be fused & then resolidified all this power is lost because it belonged to a regular crystallization & that has now become irregular.

Antimony & Arsenic are also magnecrystallic like bismuth - and crystalline plates of these metals taken from broken up masses point well provided the whole of the fragment be uniformly crystallized.

Not only are diamagnetic bodies like those mentioned but also Magnetic bodies - Magnecrystallic. Thus a crystal of protosulphate of iron is so having the Magnecrystallic axis perpendicular to two of the faces of the rhombic prism in which that salt crystallizes.

I can by arrangement oppose the Magnecrystallic force either to the magnetic or the diamagnetic condition of bodies - so that I can make a crystal of Sulphate of iron receed from a magnetic pole or a crystal of bismuth approach towards it, against what we should otherwise consider their natural tendency[.]

As I said just now this effect is not one of attraction or of repulsion but of position only, and is as far as I can see a new effect or an exertion of force new to us.

At first I thought the cause of these phenomena different to that which produced Pluckers results described in his paper on the "repulsion of the Optic axes of crystals by the Magnetic poles"⁴ but now I think it is the same though my forces are axial & he refers his results to equatorial forces or to repulsion. I will however tease you no more with these matters but send you the printed papers as soon as I can[.]

With our kindest remembrances to Madam Schoenbein

I am My dear friend | Most truly Yours | M. Faraday

Address: Dr. Schoenbein | &c &c &c | University | Bâle | on the Rhine