252 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



ance, in the general mind, of the amber to the magnet 

 ended forever the possibility of the questions concerning 

 the nature of either sinking into oblivion. But the modes 

 of dealing with these questions we have found to change 

 with the changing times. 



The tendency to speculate and to account for facts by 

 theories, which seems implanted in the race, slowly, very 

 slowly, even in the individual under the discipline of edu- 

 cation, loses its energy. So, in those old days, it was only 

 as men began to question Nature, and not their own 

 brains, that they began to perceive the conditions which 

 Nature had actually imposed on them, and to recognize 

 the difference between these and the imaginary conditions 

 which their speculations had sought to impose upon 

 Nature. Gradually the new logic of experimental demon- 

 stration gathered momentum, the phenomena of magnetic 

 polarity and of induction became recognized, and so came 

 about the first crude conception of the magnetic field of 

 force. A more exact knowledge of the magnet led in- 

 evitably to the perception of the differences between the 

 effects produced by the lodestone and by the rubbed 

 amber; and at last to the drawing of a clear line of de- 

 marcation between them. 



And then the Sphinx of the centuries follows the flies 

 and the reptiles into the golden recesses of the amber, and 

 there enthroned poses once more the nature of the amber 

 soul as a new T riddle. There is no kinship between this 

 evanescent energy drawn from these yellow depths and 

 the stolid pull of the dull stone no similarity between 

 the wayward and mastering spirit which seizes upon any- 

 thing within its strength and the unrelenting tyranny 

 with which the magnet enforces servitude only upon the 

 stubborn iron. What then is this genius which is called 

 forth by the friction of the amber, even as the Afrite was 

 summoned by the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp? Thus the 

 question first asked twenty-two hundred years before was 

 renewed : and now impressed with greater urgency than 

 ever upon the newly-awakened human intellect. 



