This account is supplemented by the following letter, written by
Faraday to his friend De la Rive,[3] on the occasion of the death
of Mrs. Marcet. The letter is dated September 2, 1858:--

'My Dear Friend,--Your subject interested me deeply every way;
for Mrs. Marcet was a good friend to me, as she must have been to
many of the human race. I entered the shop of a bookseller and
bookbinder at the age of thirteen, in the year 1804, remained there
eight years, and during the chief part of my time bound books.
Now it was in those books, in the hours after work, that I found
the beginning of my philosophy.

There were two that especially helped me, the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica," from which I gained my first notions of electricity,
and Mrs. Marcet's "Conversation on Chemistry," which gave me my
foundation in that science.

'Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a
precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and
could believe in the "Arabian Nights" as easily as in the
"Encyclopaedia." But facts were important to me, and saved me.
I could trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion.
So when I questioned Mrs. Marcet's book by such little experiments
as I could find means to perform, and found it true to the facts as
I could understand them, I felt that I had got hold of an anchor in
chemical knowledge, and clung fast to it. Thence my deep veneration
for Mrs. Marcet--first as one who had conferred great personal good
and pleasure on me; and then as one able to convey the truth and
principle of those boundless fields of knowledge which concern