362 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



before the time Congress meets in December, in the great money- 

 centers this movement will have become general on account of 

 this proposed legislation. 



Mr. Bartine. Do you know whether, after the passage of the 

 former act, contracts were made payable in gold ? 



Mr. Warner. Yes, sir ; a good many were. . . . 







SCIENTIFIC DREAMS OF THE PAST. 



By ALBEKT DE KOCHAS. 



MANY of the inventions which are the glory of our time were 

 foreseen by certain dreamers, in whose imaginations they 

 received a kind of virtual existence. The electric telegraph is 

 foreshadowed by Strada in some twenty verses of his Prolusiones 

 academicse, which were published in Rome in 1G17. To him it 

 was a fancy, a simple wish : 



" O ! utinam haec ratio scribendi prodeat usu 

 Cantior et citior properaret epistola! " 



The manner in which he understood the instrument was repro- 

 duced by all the students of the time, notably by a Jesuit of Lor- 

 raine, Pere Leurechon, in his Hilaria mathematica, published in 

 1624. I quote a passage, in which it is mentioned, from the French 

 translation published two years later at Pont a Mousson, under the 

 title of Recreations mathdmatiques, by an author who signed him- 

 self Van Etten : 



" There are some who have intimated that absent persons might 

 be able to converse by means of a magnet or some similar stone. 

 For example, Claude being in Paris and John in Rome, if each had 

 a needle rubbed on some stone the property of which was such that 

 as one of the needles moved in Paris the other would move in 

 Rome, it might be that Claude and Jbhn would both have a com- 

 mon alphabet, and that if they had agreed to speak from a dis- 

 tance every day at six o'clock in the Evening, arranging that the 

 needle should make three turns and a fklf as a signal that it was 

 Claude and no other that wished to speaa^to John. Then Claude, 

 wishing to tell him that the king is in Paris (le roy est a Paris), 

 will move his needle and stop it at L, then at E, and then at 

 R, O, Y, and so on with the others. At the same time, John's 

 needle, acting in correspondence with Claude's, will move and 

 stop at the same letters so that it will be easy for it to write and 

 make understood what the other means." " The invention is very 

 nice," Pere Leurechon remarks, " but I do not believe there is a 

 magnet in the world that has such virtues." 



