finally decided whether he should make science or wealth the pursuit of his life." Because of his recently announced discoveries in electromagnetism, as Tyndall says 1 "he had only to will it to raise in 1832 his professional business income to five thousand pounds a year. Indeed this is a wholly insufficient estimate of what he might, with ease, have realized annually during the last thirty years of his life." Instead he chose science with its £100 stipend from the Royal Institution, its two rooms, and coal eked out by a £200 lectureship at the Woolwich Royal Artillery Academy. Faraday's business income fell in consequence to £155 in 1832 and, according to Tyndall who examined his accounts, decreased "to £92 in 1837, and to zero in 1838. Between 1839 and 1845, it never except in one instance, exceeded £22; being for the most part much under this. From the end of 1845 to the day of his death (1867) Faraday's annual professional business income was exactly zero. Taking the duration of his life into account, this son of a blacksmith and apprentice to a book-binder, had to decide between a fortune of £150,000 on the one side and science on the other. He chose the latter and died a poor man."

3

Although this income from the Royal Institution was later increased by an annual stipend of £200 from the Light House Service for his services as scientific adviser, and by a yearly pension of £300 a year, as well as other small sums, Faraday and his wife continued to live in their rooms at the Royal Institution and probably gave away at least half of their income. It was part of the faith of the Sandemanians, an obscure sect modeled upon the early Christian Church and similar in many respects to the Quakers, of which both Faraday and his wife were devoted members, that "the Lord would provide"; therefore they never saved. He was equally ungrudging in the time which he devoted to personal kindnesses and would frequently sit up all night with poor and sick members of his faith. Nor was he solicitous of public honors. He declined an offer of knighthood and in writing to Lord Wrottesley, President of the Royal Society, in reply to a query as to what the government might do to stimulate science, he said "without thinking of the effect it might have upon distinguished men of science, or, upon the minds

1 Tyndall, op. cit., 189.

2 See also Thompson, Michael Faraday, 49, 66–67.

a Tyndall, op. cit., 190.

4 Faraday was also adviser to the Admiralty, but he never drew the £200 attached to the position.

5 J. H. Gladstone, Michael Faraday, 113.

• Ibid, 112.

of those who, stimulated to exertion, might become distinguished, I do think the government should for its own sake honour the men who do honour and service to the country. I refer now to honours only, not to beneficial rewards; of such honours I think there are none. Knighthoods and baronetcies are sometimes conferred with such intentions, but I think them utterly unfit for that purpose. Instead of conferring distinction, they confound the man with hundreds of others. They depress rather than exalt him for they tend to lower the especial distinction of mind to the commonplaces of society. An intelligent people ought to recognize the scientific men among its people as a class. The aristocracy of the class should have distinction, such as to be worthy of those whom the Sovereign and the country should delight to honour and being rendered very desirable and even enviable in the eyes of the aristocracy by birth, should be unattainable except to that of science."

1

Such rewards therefore in Faraday's opinion should be used to honor the government that offered them and the cause of science in general, and not primarily to stimulate scientists to compete for them. Writing indeed in 1843 to an Irish scientist, Faraday observed "I have always felt that there is something degrading in offering rewards for intellectual exertion, and that societies or academies, or even kings and emperors, should mingle in the matter does not remove the degradation, for the feeling which is hurt is a point above their condition, and belongs to the respect which a man owes to himself. With this feeling, I have never since I was a boy aimed at any such prize; or even if, as in your case, they came near me, have allowed them to move me from my course; and I have always contended that such rewards will never move the men who are most worthy of reward. Still, I think rewards and honours good if properly distributed, but they should be given for what a man has done, and not offered for what he is to do, or else talent must be considered as a thing marketable and to be bought and sold, and then down falls that high tone of mind which is the best excitement to a man of power, and will make him do more than any commonplace reward. When a man is rewarded for his deserts, he honours those who grant the reward, and they give it not as a moving impulse to him, but to all those who by the reward are led to look to that man for an example."

This high and austere conception of the proper motive of a scientist is strikingly exemplified by his refusal to accept either the 1 Ibid., 110-111.

1

Presidency of the Royal Society or of the Royal Institution. When his friend Tyndall urged him to accept the former (the highest scientific recognition that could be granted in England), Faraday 1 replied, "Tyndall, I must remain plain Michael Faraday to the last, and let me now tell you, that if I accepted the honour which the Royal Society desires to confer upon me, I would not answer for the integrity of my intellect for a single year.

2. TYNDALL, MAXWELL, DARWIN and WALLACE. Tyndall himself seems not to have been influenced in the slightest by economic motives. The son of poor parents, he made a success while still in his twenties as a railway engineer, only to abandon this, much against the advice of his friends, to study chemistry at the University of Marburg. Throughout his later scientific career he demonstrated again and again his indifference to material advantage. Thus he devoted the $30,000 of proceeds from his book on Light, originally delivered as lectures in the United States, to the furtherance of scientific training in America, while he also resigned his congenial and lucrative advisorship to Trinity House, because he believed Joseph Wigham, the inventor of a system of gas lights, had been unfairly treated by that organization.

In a similar way, Clerk-Maxwell had a kindling intellectual passion untouched by economic self-seeking. The fortunate possessor of a private income, his intellectual powers ripened early, and at the age of fifteen one of his mathematical papers was read before the Edinburgh Royal Society. From then until his death at the early age of forty-eight, he exercised his talents freely without money and without price, thereby consolidating the work of Faraday without receiving a penny, aside from his University salary, for his work.2

Similarly, Darwin exhibited an extraordinary zeal for science and for creative accomplishment. Handicapped by a severe illness, resulting from his expedition on the Beagle, which caused him almost ever-present nausea, Darwin nevertheless worked up to and beyond the limit of his endurance, not for wealth, as Senior would have us believe, (for the sale of Darwin's books did not begin to meet his expenses in the research necessary to issue them) but to help solve the fundamental problems connected with the constitution and development of life. In his charming autobiography he tells us with his characteristic honesty and insight of the motive forces of his life: "

1 Tyndall, op. cit., 192-193.

2 See Campbell and Garnett, Life of James Clerk-Maxwell; and Glazebrook, James Clerk-Maxwell and Modern Physics.

3 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, I, 55; 83.

"My love of natural science has been steady and ardent. This pure love has however been much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists-I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker-I did not care much about the general public-I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame."

That this was not empty talk is evidenced by the nobility of his dealings with Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. As is well-known, Darwin had conceived his own particular theory of evolution as early as 1838 and then devoted himself for twenty years to patient investigation in order to determine its truth, only to be startled in 1858 by receiving a paper from Wallace, who was then in Malaysia, containing a theoretical statement of precisely the same major steps in evolution. Accompanying this manuscript was a letter asking Darwin to get the article published for him. Darwin's disappointment at finding that someone else had hit upon the theory before he had published it was naturally keen, but he concluded that he had no right to make any statement of his own priority and decided to send Wallace's paper to the Royal Society with a very warm commendation unaccompanied by any reference to his own work. He was thus ready to sacrifice, not only public fame, but the acclaim of his fellow-naturalists, lest he should in any way injure the opportunity of Wallace to secure credit for the theory. It was only because of the strong solicitation and pressure of Hooker and Lyell that he finally consented to let them attach a letter of his, which stated his twenty-year old theory, to the essay of Wallace. Wallace in turn always refused to be considered as equal in his discovery to Darwin and painstakingly pointed out the priority of Darwin's work and the remarkable thoroughness of the latter's proof as contrasted with his own theoretical analysis.

Wallace indeed seems to have had little or no desire for formal honors. He declined D.C.L.'s from the Universities of Wales, Cambridge, and Oxford, saying on one occasion that the granting of such a degree would involve "bother and ceremony and the having perhaps to get a blue or yellow or scarlet gown and at all events new black clothes and a new topper such as I have not worn this twenty years," and at another saying that "I have at all times a profound distaste for all public ceremonies and at this particular

1 Alfred Russel Wallace, Letters and Reminiscences, by James Marchant, published both in one and two volumes; and Wallace's My Life.

2 Marchant, op. cit., 446.

time that distaste is stronger than ever," and going on to declare that he had more important engagements that week in the form of correcting examination papers, packing books, taking care of his garden and attending a meeting of his beloved land nationalization society. Wallace did not make money in science, and devoted his energies outside of science to such unpopular causes as Land Nationalization, Anti-Militarism, and Socialism.

3. PASTEUR, LISTER, METCHNIKOFF and HERSCHEL. Equally lofty in his purposes was Louis Pasteur.1 The son of a poor tanner, his patient and imaginative researches into the causes of diseased beer and wine not merely saved those French industries and made possible the purification of the milk supply, but they disclosed germs to be the cause of most diseases. His beautiful experiments disclosing the bacteria in the air to be the cause of contamination not only gave Lister the idea that hospital gangrene and putrefaction resulted from similar causes and thus directly led to the development of antiseptic surgery but also laid the basis for isolating the germs of other diseases and for preparing counteracting vaccines and antitoxins. Similarly, Pasteur's discovery of the causes of the silk-worm blight prevented the ruination of that industry, while his vaccine against anthrax proved to be the salvation of French cattle. His last great discovery was the isolation of the hydrophobia germ and the preparation of an innoculation which removed the danger of this disease. Huxley estimated that these discoveries had by the early eighties more than sufficed to cover the billion dollar indemnity levied upon France by Germany. Since then, the monetary savings effected, not only for France but for all countries, have of course increased.

Yet Pasteur neither profited financially from these discoveries nor did he seek to do so. He and his family lived a life of extreme simplicity in a small apartment in the École Normale where he taught, and he devoted his spare energies to arousing the public and the government to the necessity of further support for scientific research. When a grateful international public subscribed two and a half million francs for the founding of the Pasteur Institute, Pasteur and his associates Roux and Chamberland, turned over to it all the income from the sale of the hydrophobia vaccine, in the discovery of which they had risked their lives.

When Louis Napoleon manifested surprise that Pasteur did not seek to make a legitimate profit from the application of his discov

1 There are two remarkable biographies of Pasteur, R. Vallery-Radot, The Life of Pasteur, and Ducloux, Pasteur, The History of a Mind.