ELECTRICITY. 89 



The progressive stages in the History of Physical Philo- 

 sophy will account in a great measure for the adoption by the 

 early electricians of the theories of fluids. 



The ancients, when they witnessed a natural phenomenon, 

 removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any 

 mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spi- 

 ritual or preternatural power ; thus amber and the magnet 

 were supposed by Thales to have a soul ; the functions of 

 digestion, assimilation, &c., were supposed by Paracelsus to 

 be effected by a spirit (the Archseus). Air and gases were 

 also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently they became 

 invested with a more material character ; and the same words, 

 Trvevpa, spirit, &c., were used to signify the soul or a gas ; the 

 very word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an in- 

 stance of the gradual transmission of a spiritual into a physical 

 conception ; the words ' give up the ghost,' ' expire,' had the 

 same confusion of ideas, and the rough conception of death 

 seemed to have been that the last long breath of the dying was 

 the expulsion or separation of the soul from the body ; indeed 

 it is so represented in ancient illuminated missals, where a faint 

 spectre is depicted as issuing from the mouth of the dying 

 man. 



The establishment by Torricelli of the ponderable char- 

 acter of air and gas, showed that substances which had been 

 deemed spiritual and essentially different from ponderable 

 matter were possessed of its attributes. A less superstitious 

 mode of reasoning ensued, and now aeriform fluids were 

 shown to be analogous in many of their actions to liquids or 

 known fluids. A belief in the existence of other fluids, differ- 

 ing from air as this differed from water, grew up, and when a 

 new phenomenon presented itself, recourse was had to a hypo- 

 thetic fluid for explaining the phenomenon and connecting it 

 with others ; the mind once possessed of the idea of a fluid, 

 soon invested it with the necessary powers and properties, 

 and grafted upon it a luxurious vegetation of imaginary 

 offshoots. 



In what I am here throwing out I wish to guard myself 

 from being supposed to state that the course of theory, histo- 

 rically viewed, followed exactly the dates of the discoveries 



