"Tyndall, I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last." In these words, with which he replied to Professor Tyndall's urgent appeal to him to accept the Presidency of the Royal Society, we have a key-note to the character of the illustrious yet modest scientist, the good and great man, whose life-story I have attempted to tell in the following pages.

A life-story such as that of Michael Faraday is both easy and difficult to tell—it is easy in that he passed a simple and unadventurous life; it is difficult, partly, perhaps, for the same reason, and partly because the story of his life-work is a story of the wonderful advance made in natural science during the first half of the present century. Any detailed account of that scientific work would be out of place in a biography such as the present, which aims at showing by the testimony of those who knew him and by an account of his relations with his fellow-men, how nobly unselfish, how simple, yet how grand and useful, was the long life of Michael Faraday.