Faraday to Arthur-Auguste De La Rive   9 July 1849

Royal Institution | 9 July 1849.

My dear De la Rive

Though I have delayed writing this letter until the last minute still I have nothing satisfactory to tell you for as yet I have not made your experiment¹. I gave orders to Newman at once for an apparatus but illness rendered me unable to follow him up or even to go on regularly with my lectures² and when at last he produced an apparatus it would not do. I have waited till today for a perfect one but have not yet received it & as we leave London directly for 6 or 7 weeks in the North I must defer the result until I come back. I have no doubt of a repetition in every point of the results you have obtained and I hope you will before then have given them to the world.

My thoughts are sluggish & heavy or I would say fifty things to you for though I have little to tell there is much I could ask of you. But head ach[e] & weariness make me quiet[.] I am afraid that the condition of Italy³ sadly affects her scientific men for I had a letter from Majocchi⁴ the other day seeming to say that he was driven from Turin & knew not what to do. For me, who never meddle with politics and who think very little of them as one of the games of life, it seems sad that Scientific men should be so disturbed by them and so the progress of pure undeviating unbiassed philosophy be so much & so often disturbed by the passions of men.

Ever my dear De la Rive | Yours Most Truly | M. Faraday

Address: A Monsieur | Professor A. de la Rive | &c &c &c | Geneva | Switzerland