206 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



only one side of it would not divide it into hemispheres, 

 and that serious dispute might easily arise as to the owner- 

 ship of territory at the antipodes, depending upon whether 

 ships sailed thereto in an easterly or westerly direction. 

 The Portuguese had found the Molucca or Spice Islands by 

 traveling constantly eastward, and had established a fine 

 trade with them in cloves and nutmegs. Upon this trade 

 the Spaniards looked with longing eyes, so that, when 

 Ferdinand Magellan suggested that it might be entirely 

 practicable to go to the same place by sailing constantly 

 westward, his persuasions found a ready and favorable re- 

 ception. For, obviously, although the islands had been 

 reached by traveling constantly to the eastward of the line 

 of no variation, and hence claimed by the Portuguese, if 

 they could be attained by traveling constantly to the west- 

 ward of the same line, the claim of the Spaniards to them, 

 under the provisions of Pope Alexander's bull, would be 

 just as good. Such was the inception of the magnificent 

 voyage of the good ship San Vittoria in 1520-22, from the 

 port of Seville to the port of Seville. Her intrepid com- 

 mander died before the task was completed, but through 

 his indomitable perseverance and faith, the world was cir- 

 cumnavigated. 



Thus the first practical application of electricity to 

 human use for of electricity it must be remembered 

 magnetism is but one form had resulted in the greatest 

 of human achievements. And the consequences who 

 shall measure even the most immediate of them? The 

 whole commercial condition of civilization profoundly 

 changed ; new political questions engendered, to precipi- 

 tate new conflicts amid the clashing interests of the 

 nations ; new interminglings of races ; new issues of re- 

 ligion in its relation to the heathen ; old theological 

 tenets, so far as they depended on assumed flatness of the 

 earth, overthrown, and the Scriptural interpretation of 

 physical phenomena discredited ; the unsettlement and 

 moving of great bodies of people ; a new thirst for ad- 



