Note 217 — Chapter IV · ON THE INTERNAL FORM AND STRUCTURE OF THE CELL

The con­fi­gur­a­tions, as obtained by the usual experimental methods, were of course known long before Faraday’s day, and constituted the “convergent and divergent magnetic curves” of eighteenth century mathematicians. As Leslie said, in 1821, they were “regarded with wonder by a certain class of dreaming philosophers, who did not hesitate to consider them as the actual traces of an invisible fluid, perpetually circulating between the poles of the magnet.” Faraday’s great advance was to interpret them as indications of stress in a medium,—of tension or attraction along the lines, and of repulsion transverse to the lines, of the diagram.