Sir,
According to your own statement, natural p<<hilo>>sophy is indebted for the most important s<<teps>> it has made at your hands to the strong conviction you always felt, that the various forms of force have one common origin, any form of force admitting of being converted into another under appropriate circumstances1. Nor have you, on several occasions, refrained from extending this view even to the mysterious agent of the nerves, and, in your paper on the Gymnotus2, you have suggested some experiments for the purpose of discovering some new relation between nervous power and electricity.
I therefore venture to hope that you wil<<l>> look with some interest on the results of an experimental inquiry, in which I have been engaged for these last eight years. This inquiry has led me to the most striking facts bearing upon the long-suspected identity of the nervous and muscular power and the electro-chemical form of force. The greater part of my investigations are detailed at length in the two accompanying volumes3, which I beg you to accept as a proof of my deepest veneration.
I am very sorry to find, from your ‘Experimental Researches’ you do not read German4. Unfortunately, the subject I have treated is such a complicated one, and the various series of experiments are so extensive, that the shortest extract, to be intelligible at all, would far exceed the limits of a letter and probably of your patience also. You will, however, perhaps be kind enough to prevail upon some friend of yours to bring you and the scientific public of England acquainted with some parts, if not the whole, of my work; and, at least, you will see by a mere inspection of the plates, that it is not without having previously laid a new and somewhat large experimental groundwork, that I am so bold as, once more and that so positively, to bring forward theoretical views like those of old Priestley5 and Galvani6.
The second copy you would greatly oblige me by presenting, as a token of respect, to the Royal Society.
I am, Sir, yours most respectfully | Dr. E. du Bois-Reymond
Berlin, 21. Carlstr. | November 15, 1849.
Address: To | Mr. Faraday | Professor of Chemistry in the | Royal Institution, London.
BOIS-REYMOND, Emil Heinrich du (1848-9): Untersuchungen über thierische Elektricität, 2 volumes, Berlin.
FARADAY, Michael (1838c): “Experimental Researches in Electricity. - Thirteenth Series. On Induction (continued). Nature of the electric current”, Phil. Trans., 128: 125-68.
FARADAY, Michael (1839a): “Experimental Researches in Electricity. - Fifteenth Series. Notice of the character and direction of the electric force of the Gymnotus”, Phil. Trans., 129: 1-12.
FARADAY, Michael (1846a): “Experimental Researches in Electricity. - Nineteenth Series. On the magnetization of light and the illumination of magnetic lines of force”, Phil. Trans., 136: 1-20.
Please cite as “Faraday2232,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday2232