22 Scientific Societies. 



Once more : a certain Italian physician was about to have for 

 dinner a soup made of what is a real delicacy, the edible frog. 

 The frogs, dead and skinned, laj' on a plate on the table, when a 

 young student in the room touched the leg of one of them with a 

 scalpel which had been in contact with an electrical machine. To 

 his astonishment the leg twitched. But as the Greeks put it, Iris 

 is the daughter of Thaumas ; in other words, the astonishment of 

 a wise ignorance is often parent to the astonishment of a living 

 knowledge. The student mentioned the fact to Madame Galvani, 

 and Madame Galvani to her husband. Galvani saw its importance 

 and determined to interrogate nature as to its significance ; he 

 experimented and meditated on the fact, and became thereby, not 

 in virtue of the accident, but in virtue first of the observing mind 

 and then of the wise toil which he brought to bear upon it, the 

 founder of that new and immensely important science to which he 

 .gave his name. 



I will mention but one case more. One summer evening a 

 young French officer named Mains was walking home, when he 

 was struck with the golden blaze caused by the sunset on a window 

 of the Luxembourg. Taking out of his pocket a piece of double 

 refracting spar, he observed with astonishment that in two positions 

 of the crystal, one of the double images disappeared. It was a 

 curious fact; but what would have been its value in the hands of 

 any but a man of genius ? In the hands of Malus, though he 

 survived the discovery but four years, it led to the immediate 

 development of some of the most brilliant facts of polarisation, and 

 an immense increase oi oiu' knowledge respecting the nature and 

 the laws of light. 



These discoveries might have been attributed in part to happy 

 accidents, or fortunate combinations of circumstances, and who 

 knows, in the history of the world, how many millions of such 

 accidents have been infructuous, because like seeds that fall 

 on the desert, or rain upon the sea, they happen to un- 

 trained or sluggish minds. The shape of the earth might have 

 been discovered centuries before it was discovered, if men had 

 observed her shadow on the eclipsing moon ; and the diving- 

 bell might have saved untold wealth from the oozy bottom 

 of the deep, whole ages before the sixteenth century, if any one had 

 taken the trouble to watch the water-spider, or even to observe the 

 effects of inverting a wine-glass in a tumbler of water. But such 

 accidents are really the rewards of toil and genius. It was an 

 accident which made some Phoenician sailors light their fire on 

 blocks of natron, which formed the cargo of their vessel, when they 

 had no stones at hand on the sands of the Belus, nor did it require 

 any genius on their part to notice the vitrified lumps formed by 



