Plucker, the celebrated geometer already mentioned, who pursued
experimental physics for many years of his life with singular
devotion and success, visited Faraday in those days, and repeated
before him his beautiful experiments on magneto-optic action.
Faraday repeated and verified Plucker's observations, and concluded,
what he at first seemed to doubt, that Plucker's results and
magne-crystallic action had the same origin.

At the end of his papers, when he takes a last look along the line
of research, and then turns his eyes to the future, utterances quite
as much emotional as scientific escape from Faraday. 'I cannot,'
he says, at the end of his first paper on magne-crystallic action,
'conclude this series of researches without remarking how rapidly
the knowledge of molecular forces grows upon us, and how strikingly
every investigation tends to develop more and more their importance,
and their extreme attraction as an object of study. A few years ago
magnetism was to us an occult power, affecting only a few bodies,
now it is found to influence all bodies, and to possess the most
intimate relations with electricity, heat, chemical action, light,
crystallization, and through it, with the forces concerned in
cohesion; and we may, in the present state of things, well feel
urged to continue in our labours, encouraged by the hope of bringing
it into a bond of union with gravity itself.'



Supplementary remarks

A brief space will, perhaps, be granted me here to state the further
progress of an investigation which interested Faraday so much.