462 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



The light, still purple, is u so great that large print, 

 without much difficulty, could be read by it, and at the 

 same time the room, which was large and wide, became 

 sensibly enlightened, and the wall was visible at the re- 

 motest distance, which was at least ten feet." As he lets 

 air into the globe the radiance diminishes; but something 

 of the meaning of what he sees begins to dawn upon him. 

 He notices a similarity between the mercury light and this 

 glow of the glass the difference is as great ' * between the 

 light in the globe exhausted and the light produced when 

 the globe was empty of air, as between the lights produced 

 from mercury when the experiment was made in vacuo 

 and in the open air." 



It was fortunate for Hauksbee that he was experiment- 

 ing in the days of good Queen Anne, and showing all these 

 marvelous things to the Royal Society, which had done 

 more to overthrow superstition and especially belief in 

 witchcraft and sorcery in England than perhaps any other 

 of the great civilizing forces. Conceive of Scotch James 

 hearing with complacency of a man who makes spots of 

 light appear under his fingers as he touches a glass bottle; 

 who says, u Nay, while my hand continued upon the 

 glass the glass being in motion if any person approached 

 his fingers toward any part of it in the same horizontal 

 plane with my hand, a light would be seen to stick to 'em at 

 the distance of about an inch or thereabouts without their 

 touching the glass at all." A light, a corpse-light, cling- 

 ing to the very hands of the foolhardy wretch who ven- 

 tured near the infernal apparatus of this prince of wizards, 

 might well be the royal conclusion, followed by a dispo- 

 sition of Mr. Hauksbee which would have left the world 

 ignorant that he had ever thus exhibited the electrification 

 of the human body by induction from his glass globe. 



But, as I have said, these were the days of Queen Anne, 

 when Marlborough was returning in triumph from Ramil- 

 lies, and England and Scotland were uniting, and other 

 great political events happening, all proving how greatly 



