The wires and the surrounding water act as a Leyden jar, and the retardation of the current predicted by Faraday manifests itself in every message sent by such cables.
The meaning of Faraday in these memoirs on Induction and Conduction is, as I have said, by no means always clear; and the difficulty will be most felt by those who are best trained in ordinary theoretic conceptions.

He does not know the reader's needs, and he therefore does not meet them.

For instance he speaks over and over again of the impossibility of charging a body with one electricity, though the impossibility is by no means evident.

The key to the difficulty is this.
He looks upon every insulated conductor as the inner coating of a Leyden jar.

An insulated sphere in the middle of a room is to his mind such a coating; the walls are the outer coating, while the air between both is the insulator, across which the charge acts by induction.