Faraday: the open door of natural philosophy

Michael Faraday gave six Christmas lectures on the candle to a young audience at the Royal Institution in London, and a reporter took them down for the book printed in 1861. He had started the Christmas Lectures there in 1825, and the series still runs every December. Faraday left school early and learned chemistry while working for a bookbinder. In this passage he calls the candle the best open door into natural philosophy.

Where this text comes fromThis is spoken English written down. A reporter took the lectures in shorthand as they were delivered to an audience of children, and the sentences keep the shape of speech: they restate, they qualify, they arrive at the point by circling it rather than by announcing it. The claim being made is enormous, that no law governing the universe is absent from a burning candle, and it is made in the plainest words available, to listeners who had not been taught any others.

What you might not noticeThe lectures were taken down in shorthand as they were spoken, so what you copy is a reporter transcribing a man thinking aloud in front of an audience, not a text composed on paper. Source

What it trainsSeven commas, three full stops and nothing else at all: no semicolons, no dashes, no hyphens, no apostrophes and no quotation marks in 460 characters. That makes this the plainest punctuation of any long passage here. The difficulty is entirely in the clause structure, because the sentences average nearly twenty-nine words and each one doubles back to qualify what it has just said. The longest word is considering, eleven letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg