ELECTRICAL PROGRESS IN GERMANY. 491 



authority of Bernoulli! remained potent against Hauksbee's 

 plain demonstration of the electrical nature of the barome- 

 ter light, although Leupold reconstructed Hauksbee's 

 machine, and verified many of his conclusions. Little 

 volumes of transactions in L,atin printed at long intervals, 

 became the sole sign of the continued animation of the Ber- 

 lin Society. One electrical dissertation here appears writ- 

 ten by Johan Jacob Schilling 1 in 1734, wherein he details 

 experiments made with the rubbed tube; but they are of 

 minor consequence, and merely go to show how prevalent 

 was the belief that the electrical action resided in an at- 

 mosphere around the excited body, although Schilling's 

 particular conception of his atmosphere involves its rare- 

 faction by the heat due to the friction incident to rubbing 

 the tube, and subsequent condensation on cooling. 



Von Guericke was famous only for his pneumatic dis- 

 coveries, fixed in the popular mind by his theatrical display 

 of the Madgeburg hemispheres resisting the pull of many 

 horses. His electrical discoveries, unimportant by con- 

 trast, and described in but a few terse paragraphs in his 

 book, were forgotten or misunderstood in his own country; 

 while the foreign philosophers (always excepting the 

 liberal and cultured Dufay, whose appreciation of Von 

 Guericke we have seen), regarded Germany very much as 

 the British Ikerati looked upon the United States seventy 

 years ago as a Nazareth whence little good might be 

 expected to come. 



The year 1742 probably marks the beginning of the 

 singular and sudden interest in things electrical which 

 arose in Germany, and which swiftly reached a stage of 

 feverish enthusiasm. 2 It differed widely from the per- 



1 Schilling: Misc. Beroliniensia, Tome x., 3, 4. 



2 See Gralath : Geschichte der Elektrizitat. Versuche und Abhandlun- 

 gen, der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Dantzig. I. Theil. Dantzig, 



1747- 



Priestley : History of Electricity. London, 1767, and later editions. 



Fischer : Geschichte der Physik. Band V. Gottingen, 1804. Hoppe's 

 Geschichte der Elektrizitat, 1884, and Poggendorff's Geschichte der 

 Physik, 1879, follow these works. 



