Faraday to François Napoleon Marie Moigno   10 July 1860

The Green | Hampton Court | 10 July 1860

My dead Abbe

My Tyndall has shewn me your note and I immediately packed up the last of my volumes which consists of papers Chemical and Physical1 & have addressed it to you and left it in the Hall of the Royal Institution that M. Serrin2 may have it as he returns from Oxford3[.] I thought you had had the volume before but I suppose I was mistaken[.]

M. Serrin was at Oxford with his lamp which as far as I could judge seemed excellent in construction. He asked me for an opinion on it but as I never give an opinion for any invention brought to me I could not do so for him. Happily he was able to shew it at Oxford for though there was not a sufficient battery belonging to the establishments there a Gentleman of the name of Way who had a rival lamp there and a battery of his own was magnanimous enough to lend his battery to M. Serrin for his lamp whilst his own remained unlighted & out of use. I thought this exceedingly liberal of him[.]

I was so ill at Oxford that I could not remain there but left on the Saturday - so I do not know what happened afterward4. M. Serrin stopped I suppose to the end. M. Verdet5 was at Oxford and I was very glad to see him[.]

I have no news to tell you for I am very oblivious but I am Ever

Very Truly Yours | M. Faraday

a monsieur | M. l’Abbé Moigno | &c &c &c

1
Victor Louis Marie Serrin (b.1829, Stock (1990)). French inventor of an electric lamp.
2
Faraday (1859b).
3
From the meeting of the British Association.
4
This may be an oblique reference to the discussion on the afternoon of 30 June 1860 at the British Association over the theory of evolution by natural selection proposed by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882, ODNB). See James (2005) for an account of the discussion, the main protagonists of which were the Bishop of Oxford from 1845 to 1869, Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873, ODNB), Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker. Faraday left Oxford after being photographed that morning by the mathematician, author, photographer and Fellow of Christ Church, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898, ODNB); see Taylor et al.(2002), 251. The image is reproduced as plate 12.
5
Marcel Emile Verdet (1824-1866, P2, 3). Professor of Physics at the Ecole Normale, Paris.

Bibliography

FARADAY, Michael (1859b): Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, London.

JAMES, Frank A.J.L. (2005): “An ‘open clash between Science and the Church’?: Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker on Darwin at the British Association, Oxford, 1860”, in Knight and Eddy (2005), 171-93.

STOCK, John T. (1990): “Victor Serrin and the Origins of the Chainomatic Balance”, Bull. Hist. Chem. 8: 12-15.

Please cite as “Faraday3799,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday3799