574 TH ^ INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



imitations of those great effects which frighten us, and 

 that the whole depends upon the same mechanism; if it is 

 to be demonstrated that a cloud, prepared by the action 

 of the winds, by heat, by a mixture of exhalations, etc., is 

 opposite to a terrestrial object; that this is the electrized 

 body, and at a certain proximity from that which is not: 

 I avow that this idea, if it was well supported, would give 

 me a great deal of pleasure; and in support of it, how 

 many specious reasons present themselves to a man who 

 is well acquainted with electricity. The universality of 

 the electric matter, the readiness of its action, its inflam- 

 mability and its activity in giving fire to other bodies, the 

 property of striking bodies externally and internally, even 

 to their smallest parts, the remarkable example we have 

 of this effect in the experiment of Leyden, the idea which 

 we might truly adopt in supposing a greater degree of 

 electric power, etc. ; all these points of analogy, which I 

 have been some time meditating, begin to make me be- 

 lieve that one might, by taking electricity for the model, 

 form to oneself in relation to thunder and lightning more 

 perfect and more probable ideas than such as have been 

 offered hitherto." 



This was written in the year 1748. It adds nothing new 

 toward the solution of the question of whether the light- 

 ning and electricity are the same or even similar. It is 

 simply to the effect that the keen and skilful electrician 

 who wrote it has concluded that the arguments before him 

 are sufficient, in his opinion, to warrant some one in be- 

 ginning experiments to determine whether the idea has 

 any foundation in truth or not. It certainly does not aver 

 that he himself has done anything in the premises beyond 

 meditating, or has made a single experiment in pursuit of 

 the object, or even knows what experiments to make or 

 how to attack the matter. The sum and substance of it 

 all is that the problem is not on its face absurd and is 

 worth investigating. 



Such, in brief, were the conditions which existed when 



