242 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



day are fortunate birthdays, and a dream on a Thursday night 

 will come true. To dream of a dog or a flood is unlucky. To 

 stumble when starting on a journey is a bad sign, and before set- 

 ting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca certain formulas are mvittered 

 and signs followed. 



The Malay hates to tear down a house, and so the old one is 

 left standing when a new one is built. The ladder of a house 

 must be built just so, or disaster comes to the owner or builder; 

 and to knock one's head on the lintel is regarded as unfavorable. 

 One rises quickly from a meal; otherwise, if he is single, he may 

 be regarded with disfavor by his prospective father-in-law. 



As one travels over the archipelago he finds that superstitions 

 vary, and what may be regarded by the Malays of the peninsula 

 as particularly ominous may have no meaning at all with the 

 Malays of the south or east. The Dyaks of Borneo are probably 

 tlie most uncivilized of all the Malay tribes, for Mohammedan- 

 ism has taken but little hold upon them, and their natural pagan- 

 ism remains as yet unshaken. Of their folklore we know but little. 

 It awaits the conquest of the West, like the island itself. 



ELECTRICITY FROM THALES TO FARADAY. 



By ERNEST A. LESUEUE. 



IT is so common a notion nowadays that electricity had its birth 

 and rise in the nineteenth century that it gives one a strange 

 mental sensation to contemplate the fact that all the myriads of com- 

 mercial applications that have of late years been developed in this 

 field might have been made by the Chinese or the ancient Egyp- 

 tians, so far as the potentiality of Nature for developing electrical 

 phenomena is concerned. The writer used to know a delightful 

 old gentleman in Vermont who once referred, as to a well-known 

 fact, to Edison's having invented electricity. It is astonishing how 

 closely his state of mind typifies that of a great many people. 



In the form of the lightning, the aurora, and the shock of the 

 electric eel or torpedo, electrical manifestations have been known 

 ever since man commenced to observ^e those phenomena, but the 

 fossil resin amber was the substance which eventually gave its name 

 to the now tremendous agency. This material was observ^ed, many 

 centuries before our era, to possess the property of attracting light 

 bodies to itself when rubbed with w^ool, and, being called rjXeKTpov 

 (electron) by the Greeks, transmitted its name to the property or 

 force which it thus brought into evidence. The fact is mentioned as 



