GRAY AND DUFAY. 487 



discoveries so strange and surprising that their respective 

 beliefs in them perforce rested solely upon their mutual 

 assurances." But, in fact, neither afterwards made any 

 especially important discovery. It was not long before 

 Gray died. He had wandered off into the old belief which 

 von Guericke held, that somehow the planets were con- 

 trolled by electrical influence, and he fancied he could 

 make an apparatus in which a sphere would of its own 

 accord revolve from west to east around an electrified body. 

 But he was stricken unexpectedly, and he could tell Dr. 

 Mortimer, the Secretary of the Royal Society, who at- 

 tended his death-bed, only a few disjointed ideas, mingled 

 with expressions of a hope u that God would spare his life 

 a little longer, so that he should, from what these phe- 

 nomena point out, bring his electrical experiments to 

 greater perfection." But it was ordained otherwise, and 

 he passed away on February i5th, 1736. 



Dufay's last memoir is dated in 1737, and expresses his 

 broadest view of the great phenomena which he had 

 so well studied. "Electricity," he says, "is a quality 

 universally expanded in all the matter we know, and 

 which influences the mechanism of the universe far more 

 than we think." He has left his monument in the mag- 

 nificent Jardin des Plantes which he organized, and so 

 made every student of Nature his debtor, His solicitude 

 that the full meed of honor due to the poor brother of the 

 Charter house should be yielded never failed; and when 

 the world shall pay its tribute in enduring marble and 

 brass to the memory of Stephen Gray, electrician, it will 

 find no words more fitting to place upon it than those of 

 his generous and brilliant rival: 



u He was almost alone in England in pursuing his ob- 

 ject. To him we owe the most remarkable discoveries 

 pertaining to it; so all those who love Nature and her 

 work must infinitely regret him." 



