The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

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      PROFESSOR FARADAY.

      attended by her host, the Duke of Norfolk, and the old Duke of Wellington, explored objects of interest in the neighbourhood. She held a formal reception in the great drawing-room of the Castle, and charmed all the “country people” with her simple, winning ways and sweet courtesies. It is recorded that at the ball held after this reception her Majesty distinguished herself by the hearty manner in which she joined in the dancing, an amusement which was ever a favourite one with her in those happy days of her golden youth.

      But life in the Royal circle was not all amusement. Baron Stockmar bears testimony to the zeal with which both the Prince and the Queen devoted themselves at this time to business and graver studies. And many events were happening, many intellectual and social movements beginning to develop, which keenly interested them. The unsatisfactory position of British art—emphasised by the fate of Haydon, who committed suicide in despair of ever interesting the English people in the higher forms of art—the development of the great movement in favour of popular education, and the rise of what afterwards came to be known as the Party of Secularism, were keenly canvassed during the latter part of this eventful year in every circle where thoughtful men and women met.

      Among the many remarkable movements that arose when the country was liberated from the strain of the Free Trade agitation, was that which originated the strife between parties as to the share which the Church and the State should take in the work of education. A crude and rudimentary scheme of national education was part of Lord John Russell’s programme, and the attention of the country had been excited by a pamphlet published by the late Dr. Hook, then Vicar of Leeds, afterwards Dean of Chichester, in which he proposed a plan which very much resembles that which the late Mr. W. E. Forster induced Parliament to accept in 1870. Her Majesty and Prince Albert were deeply interested in Dr. Hook’s plan, the leading points of which were: (1) Schools to be universally supported by the State; (2) Education to be secular, but one day in the week to be set apart for religious instruction, which should be given by each denomination to the children of its own members.

      The Secularist Party owed their origin to Mr. Holyoake, who at this time began to propagate the system of ethics known as Secularism, a system which aimed at promoting the welfare of mankind by human means, and measuring it by utilitarian standards. The service of others he held to be the highest duty of life. Secularism rejoiced in life as the sphere of exalting duties. It was a religion of doubt, neither affirming nor denying the existence of a Deity. Ultimately it came to be termed Agnosticism, and the working classes seemed to be considerably influenced by Mr. Holyoake’s teaching during this year and a few of the years that followed.

      In the year 1846 the scientific world was greatly interested by the publication of a most extraordinary series of experimental researches in electricity conducted by Faraday, illustrating alike the genius of the man and the spirit and methods of scientific investigation during the early part of the Victorian epoch. That spirit was, in the main, antagonistic to vacuous speculation or unprofitable theorising. It was daring enough in its utilitarianism to track by direct experiment the subtle elements of, or prove by tangible demonstration what were the occult relations which subsisted between, forms of matter and modes of force. “I have long held the opinion,” wrote Faraday, “that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin, or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.... I recently resumed the inquiry by experiment in a most strict and searching manner, and have at last succeeded in magnetising and electrifying a ray of light and in illuminating a magnetic line of force.”64 The phrase is not a felicitous one to express the idea of the transformation and transmutation of the forces, but it is worth citing as the original expression used. The paper from which it is taken simply proved that a ray of polarised light sent through certain transparent substances in the line of action connecting the two poles of a magnet, became visible or invisible just as the current was flowing or was stopped. In another paper “On New Magnetic Actions,” Faraday proved that a non-magnetic body suspended freely in the line of a magnetic current is repelled by either pole, and takes up a position at right angles to the line, and, therefore, at right angles to the line a magnetic body would assume in similar circumstances.

      But perhaps one of the most interesting events, to Prince Albert at least, was the laying of the first submarine telegraph cable at Portsmouth on the 13th of December, 1846. In the year 1843 telegraphic communication from the Nine Elms terminus at Portsmouth to Gosport had been established. Then the wires were continued to the Clarence Victualling Yard. The harbour, however, still intervened between the end of the wire and the Port Admiral’s house, and it was supposed to be impossible to connect the two points electrically under water. The first plan suggested was to lay the wires in metal cases, to be fixed in position by divers with diving-bells. But it was finally agreed to lay the wires in a stout cable, and this was done without the use of a return wire. The first message sent over it thus demonstrated that water would act as a ready conductor in completing the electrical circuit, and almost immediately projectors were developing a plan for laying a submarine cable to France. This and the discovery of the use of ether as an anæsthetic in surgery—the first painless operation being performed on a patient under its influence by Mr. Liston in University College Hospital—were the chief practical achievements in science during a year which closed with anxious forebodings from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, where the scourge of famine was again smiting the people.