Letter from Michael Faraday, London, to Marc Séguin, 1861 September 17 : autograph manuscript signed.

Faraday congratulates Séguin on his "continued activity mental and physical," and complains of his own failing powers: "I cannot retain ideas or recollect them & the absence of memory interferes with every intellectual exertion for in fact it removes the material for such exertion out of the way." Faraday points out that he has not taken part in the government of the Royal Society for many years and therefore cannot influence the election of Foreign Members (evidently Séguin wished to be distinguished in this way). Faraday was one of only eight foreign members of the French Academy of Sciences. The letter concludes, with characteristic modesty but rather forlornly: "All I desire now is to be able to add now & then some contribution to science but the hopes of that even are taken away by the absence of memory and therefore the absence of the power of doing mental work."