98 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



who, pursuing it, have educated themselves. Though men may be specially 

 fitted by the nature of their minds for the attainment and advance of litera- 

 ture, science, or the fine arts, all these men, and all others, require first to be 

 educated in that which is known in these respective mental paths; and when 

 they go beyond this preliminary teaching, they require a self-education 

 directed (at least in science) to the highest reasoning power of the mind. 

 Any part of pure science may be selected to show how much this private 

 self-teaching has done, and by that to aid the present movement in favor of 

 the recognition generally of scientific education in an equal degree with that 

 which is literary ; but perhaps electricity, as being the portion which has 

 been left most to its own development, and has produced as its results the 

 most enduring marks on the face of the globe, may be referred to. In 1800 

 Volta discovered the voltaic pile giving a source and form of electricity 

 before unknown. It was not an accident, but resulted from his ov,n mental 

 self-education. It was, at first, a feeble instrument, giving feeble results ; but, 

 by the united mental exertions of other men, who educated themselves 

 through the force of thought and experiment, it has been raised up to such 

 a degree of power as to give us light, and heat, and magnetic and chemical 

 action, in states more exalted than those supplied by any other means. In 

 1819 Oersted discovered the magnetism of the electric current, and its rela- 

 tion to the magnetic needle ; and as an immediate consequence, other men, 

 as Arairo and Davy, instructing themselves by the partial laws and action 

 of the bodies concerned, magnetized iron by the current. The results were 

 so feeble at first as to be scarcely visible; but, by the exertion of self-taught 

 men since then, they have been exalted so highly as to give us magnets of a 

 force unimaginable "in former times. In 1831 the induction of electrical cur- 

 rents one by another, and the evolution of electricity from magnets, was 

 observed, at first in results so small and feeble that it required one much 

 instructed in the pursuit to perceive and lay hold of them ; but these feeble 

 results, taken into the minds of men already partially educated and ever pro- 

 ceeding onwards in their self-education, have been so developed as to supply 

 sources of electricity independent of the voltaic battery or the electric ma- 

 chine, yet having the power of both combined in a manner and degree which 

 they, neither separate nor together, could ever have given it, and applicable 

 to all the practical electrical purposes of life.. To consider all the depart- 

 ments of electricity fully, would be to lose the argument for its fitness in sub- 

 serving education in the vastness of its extent; and it will be better to con- 

 fine the attention to one application, as the electric telegraph, and even to 

 one small part of that application, in the present case. Thoughts of an 

 electric telegraph came over the minds of those who had been instructed in 

 the nature of electricity as soon as the conduction of that power with extreme 

 swiftness through metals was known, and grew as the knowledge of that 

 branch of science increased. The thought, as realized at the present day, 

 includes a wonderful amount of study and development. As the end in view 

 presented itself more and more distinctly, points, at first apparently of no 

 consequence to the knowledge of the science, generally rose into an impor- 

 tance which obtained for them the most careful culture and examination, and 

 the almost exclusive exercise of minds whose powers of judgment and rea- 

 sonino- had been raised first by general education, and who, in addition, had 

 acquired the special kind of education which the science in its previous state 

 could give. Numerous and important as the points are, which have been 

 already recognized, .others are continually coming into sight as the great 



