AITD LIGHTNING C0NDDCT0E3. 57 



seem as undetermined now as it was the first day it was 

 broached. This is the more to be lamented, because the 

 confidence which ought to be reposed in lightning conduc- 

 tors, notwithstanding the numbers that have been erected, 

 remains imperfectly established : nor is it likely that much 

 reliance will be placed on those in common use, so long as 

 lightning is known to commit its ravages much within the 

 range of their supposed protective influence, as prescribed 

 in the theories of philosophers whose names most justly 

 stand in high repute. 



3. Mr. Benjamin Wilson, than whom no contemporary 

 electrician was more capable of investigating the subject, 

 nor any one more zealous and indefatigable in arriving at 

 experimental truths connected with it, most strenuously 

 objected to the pointed conductors of Franklin; and, although 

 his views were disregarded by a committee of the Royal 

 Society when lightning-rods were proposed for the Pur- 

 fleet magazines, it is a remarkable fact that the most valuable 

 experiments brought forward on that memorable occasion 

 were those made by Mr. Wilson himself; and which tended 

 as decidedly to confirm the justness of his own views re- 

 specting pointed conductors, as any that were produced in 

 favour of them. 



4. At the time this controversy was going on, the subject 

 was comparatively new, its introduction to the scientific 

 world being recent, and no discussion of importance having 

 previously taken place. Moreover, at that period philoso- 

 phers had no means of ascertaining, from actual observation 

 on an extensive scale, the influence of vertical conductors 

 in giving direction to strokes of lightning, or of preventing 

 them altogether ; their only guide being a few experimental 

 facts, which were too limited in the range of their action to 

 establish a theory sufficiently comprehensive to embrace 

 every topic concerned in the investigation. Since that 



I 



