He kept too a note-book called "The Philosophical Miscellany," intended, he tells us, "to promote both amusement and instruction, and also to corroborate or invalidate those theories which are continually starting into the world of science;" and miscellaneous indeed were the scraps he gathered from the magazines of the time.
One day, early in 1810, walking somewhere in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street, he saw in a shop-window a bill announcing that lectures on natural philosophy were delivered by Mr. Tatum, at 53, Dorset Street, at eight in the evening, price of admission one shilling. He wanted to hear these lectures. His master's permission was obtained, but where was the money to come from? The needful shillings were given him by his elder brother, Robert, who earned them as a blacksmith; and so Michael Faraday made his first acquaintance with scientific lectures. And not with lectures only, for Tatum's house was frequented by other earnest students, and lifelong friendships were formed. Among these students was Benjamin Abbott, a young Quaker, who had received a good education, and had then a situation in a City house as confidential clerk. With him Faraday chatted on philosophy or anything else, and happily for us he chatted on paper, in letters of that fulness and length which the penny post and the telegraph have well-nigh driven out of existence; and happily for us, too, Abbott kept those letters, and Dr. Bence Jones has published them. They are wonderful letters for a poor bookseller's apprentice; they bear the stamp of an innate gentleman and philosopher.
Long afterwards, when Benjamin Abbott was an old man, he used to tell how Faraday made his first experiments in the kitchen of his house, and delivered his first lecture from the end of that kitchen table. The electrical machine made by him in those early days came into the possession of Sir James South, and now forms one of the treasures of the Royal Institution.
As the eager student drank in the lectures of Tatum, he took notes, and he afterwards wrote them out carefully in a clear hand, numbering and describing the different experiments that he saw performed, and making wonderfully neat drawings of the apparatus, in good perspective. These notes he bound in four volumes, adding to each a copious index, and prefixing to the first this dedication to his master:--