402 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the company, anxious to invest in what they believed would sud- 

 denly enrich them. Indeed, all England seemed to go mad, and 

 the craze of the time is reflected in the writings of Pope and Swift. 

 Pope says: 



" At length conniption like a general flood 

 Did deluge all ; and avarice creeping on, 

 Spread like a low-born mist, and hid the sun. 

 Statesmen and patriots plied alike the stocks, 

 Peeress and butler shared alike the box ; 

 And judges jobbed, and bishops bit the town. 

 And mighty dukes packed cards for half a crown ; 

 Britain was sunk in lucre's sordid charms." 



The rise of the great bubble was accompanied by the formation 

 of hundreds of minor ones. Among these we will mention a few 

 which are pertinent to the subject of this paper: 



A wheel for perpetual motion. Capital, one million pounds. 



For extracting silver from lead. 



For the transmutation of quicksilver into a malleable fine metal. 



Puckles Machine Company, for discharging round and square 

 cannon balls and bullets, and making a total revolution in " the 

 art of war." 



For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, "but 

 nobody to know what it is." 



It is estimated that the proposed capital for floating these and 

 similar schemes was three hundred million pounds. We find, in 

 the annals of the time, that the Duchess of Marlborough per- 

 suaded her husband, John Churchill, the great general, not to 

 increase his holdings, and to sell his shares; he, like a sensible man, 

 took a sensible woman's advice and made one hundred thousand 

 pounds. When we come to speak of the connection of women with 

 modern delusions, we must remember this act of one of their sex. 



At this time, nearly two hundred years after the singular out- 

 break of chimerical projects of Queen Anne's reign, we can match 

 some of these bubbles almost exactly; for have we not had the 

 Koeley motor, the extraction of gold from salt water, and is there 

 not great activity in making the wonder of the public over some 

 advance in science a source of money-making? The unscientific 

 person is certainly open to a new danger in the increasing tendency 

 to promote enterprises based upon some new scientific discovery, 

 and it behooves the followers of science to suggest a remedy for 

 this growing evil. I shall endeavor to do my part in this paper 

 in pointing out the necessity of some oracular medium — a scientific 

 oracle of Delphos — to which the common man can repair and get 

 trustworthy information, for it is a melancholy fact that such infer- 



