It would, however, be easy to criticise these researches, easy to show the looseness, and sometimes the inaccuracy, of the phraseology employed; but this critical spirit will get little good out of Faraday.

Rather let those who ponder his works seek to realise the object he set before him, not permitting his occasional vagueness to interfere with their appreciation of his speculations.

We may see the ripples, and eddies, and vortices of a flowing stream, without being able to resolve all these motions into their constituent elements; and so it sometimes strikes me that Faraday clearly saw the play of fluids and ethers and atoms, though his previous training did not enable him to resolve what he saw into its constituents, or describe it in a manner satisfactory to a mind versed in mechanics.

And then again occur, I confess, dark sayings, difficult to be understood, which disturb my confidence in this conclusion.

It must, however, always be remembered that he works at the very boundaries of our knowledge, and that his mind habitually dwells in the 'boundless contiguity of shade' by which that knowledge is surrounded.
In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday's previous works.