BROWNE'S EXPERIMENTS. 387 



each into twenty-three parts, placing therein two stiles or 

 needles composed of the same steel, touched with the same 

 lodestone and at the same point; of these two, whensoever 

 I removed the one although but the distance of half a span, 

 the other would stand like Hercules' pillars, and (if the 

 earth stand still) have surely no motion at all. Now, as it 

 is not possible that any body should have no boundaries or 

 sphere of its activity, so it is improbable it should effect 

 that at a distance which nearer at hand it cannot at all 

 perform." 



That gave its quietus to Porta's ingenious conjecture, 

 but still not to the idea which was the life and soul of it. 

 "Now, though this desirable effect possibly may not yet 

 answer the expectation of inquisitive experiment," says 

 Glanvil twenty years later, u yet 'tis no despicable item 

 that by some other such way of magnetick efficiency it 

 may hereafter with success be attempted ... to confer at 

 the distance of the Indies by sympathetic contrivances may 

 be as usual to future times as to us in a literary correspond- 

 ence." l And again and again in after years this persistent, 

 all-pervading world-notion, which, perhaps, begins with 

 the Scriptural, u Canst thou send lightnings that they 

 may go and say unto thee, here we are," reappeared. 

 u Whatever the way or the manner or the means of it may 

 be," says Beal, 2 writing to Boyle in 1670, in words which 

 sound like those of a seer, "we are sure that we have a 

 perception at great distance, and otherwise than by our 

 known senses, and sometimes a secret anticipation of 

 things future, which cannot be without correspondence 

 with some causative. Whether aerial, more refinedly ethe- 

 real, intelligent or astral, whether by any one or other, or 

 all of these strange expedients, we are sure of the great 

 and strange effects; and when we see how quickly the 

 sunbeams do pass to the borders of this vertex, we may 

 well imagine that our spirits may hold an intercourse at 



1 Glanvil: Scepsis Scientifica. Lond., 1665, chaps, xix. and xxi. 

 2 Boyle: Works, cit. sup. 



