428 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



trive when a little child; he stopped contriving when old, 

 blind, bed-ridden and dying, his shaking hand refused to 

 feel out to the end the scrawl descriptive of a new instru- 

 ment. He invented as he breathed, because he could not 

 help doing so, and he ceased inventing when he ceased 

 breathing. He cared for nothing else. After he had 

 passed away, when his few earthly belongings were sifted 

 by his fewer friends, they found a large iron chest which 

 had been locked down with the key in it, with a date of 

 the time, by which it appeared to have been shut up for 

 more than thirty years, and the contents amounted in 

 value to many thousands of pounds in gold and silver. 

 In the prime of life, at thirty-seven, when the world 

 looked bright before him, he had conceived a great project 

 that same great project which every inventor has lurk- 

 ing somewhere in his brain to come forth in his benevolent 

 moments of founding a vast laboratory and museum and 

 library containing everything to help every one who needed 

 to be helped in the study of science, every one who had felt 

 the needs which he had felt; but when Hooke found 

 others not only climbing his ladder, but making a ladder 

 of him, he locked up the hoard and waited for the mil- 

 lennium when the inventor and his kind shall dwell in 

 perfect peace, mutual love and harmony, and all their 

 competitions be squared by the Golden Rule; a result even 

 the dim outline of which in the blue of the furthest hori- 

 zon, it is needless to add, we are still as unable as ever to 

 discern. 



Robert Hooke was indeed the typical inventor. To say 

 that his inventions are numbered by hundreds conveys 

 little in these days of inventive attenuations. Their 

 diversity, however, was extraordinary, and now and 

 then an idea flashes out which, in the light of after dis- 

 covery, is surprising. From Boyle's air-pump he turns to 

 the flying machine, tries to construct "artificial muscles," 

 and then a contrivance to raise a man by "horizontal 

 vanes a little aslope to the wind," toward which last there 



