HAUKSBEE AND HIS TIMES. 463 



the times had changed; and as to this last it is significant 

 that Hauksbee's treatise and the Tatler newspaper the 

 first real Anglo-Saxon newspaper which did not get its 

 home news by way of the Dutch appeared in the same 

 year. One not unnaturally follows such a chronicle of 

 physical discovery as this, tracing the struggles of men to 

 wrest from unwilling nature her secrets, often forgetting 

 that the achievements or the failures are correlated to other 

 and widely different events peculiar to especial ages and 

 times. True, such research merely reveals natural laws 

 which are the same yesterday, to-day and forever; and 

 whether this is done a hundred years earlier or later, or 

 brings to the discoverer fame or a fagot, cannot alter 

 the ultimate supremacy of the truth. Yet there is a great 

 world living and moving outside the walls of the labora- 

 tory and influencing in his every act the man that is within 

 it, sometimes to encourage, oftener to dishearten. It has 

 had a great deal to do with the rise of electrical knowledge, 

 mainly in the way of prevention; but never before have its 

 ignorance and credulity and superstition strewn fewer ob- 

 stacles in the pathway. Mr. Hauksbee's hands may glow 

 and his fingers may sparkle with the ineffectual fires of the 

 excited glass, without fear of a change to the flames of 

 Smithfield. Perhaps his future associate in the Royal So- 

 ciety, the Reverend Cotton Mather, resident in New Eng- 

 land, might feel moved to offer him the joys of martyrdom 

 were his lights flashing in Boston instead of in London; 

 but in Old England, the England of Steele and Addison 

 and Swift of Isaac Bickerstaffe and Sir Roger de Coverley 

 and Gulliver even Mr. Hauksbee's neck-cloth may become 

 as "fiery" as it likes without provoking the grewsome sum- 

 mons of the witch-finder. Besides, his " Physico-Mechan- 

 ical Experiments," and the first volume of Mr. Addison's 

 Spectator own the same noble patron, John, Lord Somers, 

 sometime President of the Royal Society and Lord Chan- 

 cellor of England; a good and stalwart bulwark at home, 

 even if across the Atlantic, in Cotton Mather's land, that 



