492 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



functory craze which had taken possession of the English 

 aristocracy at the behest of Charles. It had still less re- 

 semblance to the combined onslaught of the French phil- 

 osophers which was designed to take all of Nature's 

 secrets by storm. It was distinctively popular. It was 

 the first instance many times since repeated of the 

 intelligent portion of an entire community regarding with 

 absorbing wonder the working of electric powers. 



No unexpected desire for electrical knowledge in gen- 

 eral had been born. The German naturalists were familiar 

 with progress abroad during the last fifty years, but had 

 shown no emulative spirit. The new motive force now 

 came not from them, but from the people; and the people, 

 in all times and in all ages, have never failed to respond to 

 an appeal to their sense of the marvelous to a conviction 

 that something new has been found something at once 

 new and incomprehensible. The masses had cared little 

 for Hauksbee's lights, and less for the vagrant virtue on 

 Gray's lines, assuming that the knowledge of either per- 

 colated to them; but when it came to be noised about that 

 the strange radiance which the English and French phil- 

 osophers were exhibiting was fire, fire which flamed in 

 jets from the ends of rods, or, more wondrous still, leaped 

 from the tips of men's fingers that was a matter for every 

 one's personal concern. For fire was then believed to 

 be a material substance phlogiston and while perhaps 

 it might exist in iron bars and inanimate things of that 

 kind, and be forced visibly to come out of them by fric- 

 tion, as well as by heating, no one had ever supposed that 

 it resided in the human body and could be compelled to 

 escape, with an accompaniment of sparks and crackles, 

 from one's person. It was the idea of a human being 

 becoming such a torch that stirred the Teutonic mind to 

 its profoundest depths. The impetus which electrical 

 science had received from the fancy of a dissolute king 

 was nearly spent: now progress was resumed with renewed 

 vigor under that due to the astonishment and wonder 



