disadvantages; they afford peaceful lodging to the intellect for a
time, but they also circumscribe it, and by-and-by, when the mind
has grown too large for its lodging, it often finds difficulty in
breaking down the walls of what has become its prison instead of its
home.[1]

No man ever felt this tyranny of symbols more deeply than Faraday,
and no man was ever more assiduous than he to liberate himself from
them, and the terms which suggested them. Calling Dr. Whewell to
his aid in 1833, he endeavoured to displace by others all terms
tainted by a foregone conclusion. His paper on Electro-chemical
Decomposition, received by the Royal Society on January 9, 1834,
opens with the proposal of a new terminology. He would avoid the
word 'current' if he could.[2] He does abandon the word 'poles' as
applied to the ends of a decomposing cell, because it suggests the
idea of attraction, substituting for it the perfectly natural term
Electrodes. He applied the term Electrolyte to every substance
which can be decomposed by the current, and the act of decomposition
he called Electrolysis. All these terms have become current in
science. He called the positive electrode the Anode, and the
negative one the Cathode, but these terms, though frequently used,
have not enjoyed the same currency as the others. The terms Anion
and Cation, which he applied to the constituents of the decomposed
electrolyte, and the term Ion, which included both anions and
cations, are still less frequently employed.

Faraday now passes from terminology to research; he sees the
necessity of quantitative determinations, and seeks to supply
himself with a measure of voltaic electricity. This he finds in the
quantity of water decomposed by the current. He tests this measure