l68 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



trolled them. And beyond all this, conceive of the 

 tremendous influence upon this soldier-monk, imbued 

 with the superstitions of his creed, of the conviction that 

 he might be the chosen of the Almighty to remove the 

 curse of Eden, and to relieve man from the earning of his 

 bread by the sweat of his brow. 



He does not say this in the letter which he wrote on the 

 1 2th day of August, 1269, from the trenches in front 

 of Lucera. The stake would, no doubt, have claimed him 

 in short order, had he dared even to breathe a word of such 

 a doctrine. But no one can read that missive without see- 

 ing how deeply the writer's soul was stirred within him. 

 The person to whom he sent it was not a philosopher like 

 himself, not even a scholar, but a knight, one Sigerus of 

 Foucaucourt, and his next-door neighbor at home. " Ami- 

 corum in time" ''nearest of friends" is the form of ad- 

 dress, and the story is told as if in answer to some question 

 put by Sigerus concerning the occult virtue of the magnet. 

 But it all leads up to the machine which its inventor 

 thought would run forever, and which is described in his 

 last chapter ; and what precedes is introduction, evidently 

 intended simply to educate the recipient to a comprehen- 

 sion of the great result which the writer believed he had 

 attained. It was the beginning of the arch-delusion in 

 mechanics which ran for centuries parallel with the arch- 

 delusion in chemistry, and with consequences very similar. 

 For, as the search for the philosopher's stone and the 

 elixir of youth brought to light many of the basic truths 

 of the one science, so the equally vain quest for the per- 

 petual motion has resulted in the discovery of many of 

 the underlying principles of the other. 



But let us examine the letter itself. It begins with a 

 brief table of contents designed to show the orderly plan 

 on which it is arranged. There are two parts the first 

 divided into ten chapters and relating to general prin- 

 ciples ; the second, into three chapters, which set forth 

 the apparatus in which these principles are embodied. 



