HAUKSBEE'S EXPERIMENTS. 465 



sions. Hauksbee has found that the rubbed glass glows, 

 mercury rubs glass, glass is an electric excited by rubbing; 

 ergo, says the Keen Intelligence, glancing at this page 

 and bounding unerringly to the inevitable sequel, he has 

 discovered the mercurial light to be electric. That, how- 

 ever, is what the Keen Intelligence would have done in 

 Hauksbee's place; but it should be remembered that minds 

 differ, and Hauksbee's was not of the superior nineteenth 

 century, but of the inferior eighteenth century variety; 

 and hence, unable as yet, despite all that has happened, 

 to harbor the notion that electricity has anything to do 

 with the matter at all. So we must follow him a little 

 further in his gropings. 



Serious physical discoveries, untinged by any trace of 

 levity, have a way of getting into that stage in which 

 Charles Lamb records the cooking of roast pig to have 

 long remained before the important fact was revealed that 

 it was not necessary to burn down a whole house in order 

 to roast that succulent animal. 



The imagination always recoils from abstractions, and 

 insensibly links an idea with the particular thing in which 

 it happens first to- be embodied, or through which it first 

 came to be known. Consequently when Hauksbee desires to 

 test his explanation of the light as due to the friction of 

 mercury on glass, he goes back to the barometer, although 

 that instrument, as a barometer, had nothing to do with 

 the effect; just as people all over Europe, for a considerable 

 time, depopulated the frog ponds, under the notion that 

 Galvani's discovery could not be made manifest except 

 through the actual frogs' legs. He rubs the empty tube 

 above the mercury with his fingers, and then again he sees 

 the light, which follows his fingers without any motion of 

 the quicksilver at all. That brings him to Newton's ex- 

 periment the attraction of the bits of leaf brass and paper 

 by rubbed glass although he does not recognize it as New- 

 ton's, because he has reached it by his own independent 

 reasoning, and, in fact, has re-invented it. Then he be- 

 30 



