Faraday to Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz1   20 October 1863

Royal Institution | 20 October 1863.

My dear Agassiz

I wish I could send you a book or some evidence of scientific occupation but all I can do now is to take a pen & thank those who work & remember me in connexion with work. I am very grateful to you for your method of Study and for your opinion given in it of the transmutation question2. I have little or no right to judge of it philosophically but the evidence the advocates give is so weak & feeble that I feel as if they had no more right than I have3.

I have not met Mr. Lesley4 yet & fear I may not for when I called yesterday at the Hotel they gave me to understand he was going away[.]

Ever My dear Sir | Yours Most truly | M. Faraday

Profr. L Agassiz | &c &c &c

1
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873, ANB). Swiss-American naturalist and geologist. Professor at Harvard from 1847.
2
Agassiz (1863), 140-7.
3
‘Agassiz reports that a letter he has from Faraday pronounces that ‘Darwinism’has about had its day in England. But when, at length, A. showed me Faraday’s note, I could not see that it said or implied anything of the sort’. Gray to Darwin, 23 November 1863, Burkhardt et al. (1985–2010), 11: 677-80 on 678.
4
Peter Lesley (1819–1903, DAB). American geologist visiting Europe to study the railways and steel making.

Bibliography

AGASSIZ, Jean Louis Rodolphe (1863): Methods of Study in Natural History, Boston.

Please cite as “Faraday4381,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday4381