412 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



board "till it be like a globe with the poles in the hori- 

 zon." This board he dusted over with steel filings 

 "equally from a sieve" and then studied the curves of the 

 filings as they delineated the magnetic spectrum. Sprat 

 tells us that he found that "the lines of the directive vir- 

 tue of the lodestone" are "oval" and that appears to 

 have been another recognition of "lines" of directive vir- 

 tue a conception curiously similar to Faraday's lines of 

 magnetic force. 



Among the other experiments which Sprat records, 

 made prior to 1665, when the Society began the publica- 

 tion of its transactions, are essays "to manifest those lines 

 of direction by the help of needles; to discover those lines 

 of direction when the influence of many lodestones is com- 

 pounded; to find what those lines are in compassing a 

 spherical lodestone, what about a square, and what about 

 a regular figure; to bore through the axis of a lodestone 

 and fill it up with a cylindrical steel." Experiments also 

 were made on lodestones "having many poles and yet the 

 stones seeming uniform;" "on the directive virtue of the 

 lodestone under water," and "to examine the force of the 

 attractive power through several mediums." 



No reform sought by the Society proved of higher mo- 

 ment to the progress of science than that which put an en< 

 to the De Natura Rerum treatise. If any one had anything 

 to communicate, it compelled him to do so relevantly an< 

 briefly. It ruthlessly rejected dissertations starting from 

 the time of Adam, introductory to a physical fact observe 

 yesterday. It "exacted from all its members a cl< 

 naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions 

 clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as neai 

 the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the 

 language of artisans, countrymen and merchants befoi 

 that of wits or scholars." Thence sprang that require 

 ment which enters into all highly-developed modern syj 

 terns of Patent Law, that a specification shall not 

 addressed to the erudite and learned, but shall be writtei 



