300 THE INTELLECTUAL RISK IN ELECTRICITY. 



It was an astounding discovery this prevalence of the 

 amber-soul. It meant that the spirit which men, through 

 all ages, had supposed locked in the amber along with the 

 dead flies and bees there imprisoned, had never been so 

 confined. This was an Ariel which had not been bound 

 in the cleft pine, now at last set loose by the magician's 

 hand, but a sprite which had always been free to play a 

 part among the things of heaven and earth undreamt of in 

 man's philosophy. But Gilbert was no poet, nor ever 

 "waxed desperate in imagination." Even when his inner 

 vision pictured the eternal motion of the rolling spheres, 

 their silent music never reached his thought. Besides, in 

 the present instance, he was vitally concerned with the 

 bedevilments of his theory, which seemed likely to follow; 

 and a clear, practical and definite understanding of the 

 physical cause was what he needed, and least of all any 

 befogging of it by poetic imagery or idealization. 



What could be more different than the substances which 

 this force seemed to animate what more contrasting than 

 sulphur and the sapphire or the true gems and the false? 

 There were no such dissimilarities between the various 

 kinds of lodestone, or even between the lodestone and the 

 iron ; so that the attracting capacity possessed by these 

 involved no great diversity of substance. But here was 

 attraction existing in bodies so totally unlike that to 

 assert that all of them contained a primordial terrene 

 magnetic Matter, would be to ascribe to that assumed sub- 

 stance a Protean capacity for change which would virtu- 

 ally argue it out of existence. 



It was plain, therefore, that the amber quality was not 

 something exceptional pertaining to the resin, but de- 

 pended upon some cause hitherto unrecognized yet widely 

 prevalent. Equally plain was it also to Gilbert, that so 

 far from the difficulties of bringing this phenomenon into 

 harmony with his magnetic hypothesis being diminished 

 by the discovery of such prevalence, they were so greatly 

 magnified as to render the effort obviously futile. A few 



