594 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



before and around her and embarrass her in every way." 1 

 So said the Master of Electricity. Nor does he picture all 

 her task; for there is mental inertia to be overcome and 

 conditions to be created, whereby minds are rendered will- 

 ing to conceive as possible, things contradicting experi- 

 ences or habits of thought, long established and familiar. 



How fraught with these difficulties, how impeded by 

 these obstacles, has been the intellectual rise in electricity, 

 and yet how persistently, how inevitably it has moved on- 

 ward of this, some imperfect idea may perhaps be gleaned 

 from these pages. After all, they recount but one of the 

 many struggles of the human mind clearly to perceive, and 

 so perceiving to understand, something which it intui- 

 tively recognizes as written in the great book of Nature. 

 Whether it be a woman of Syria, in a bygone age, cur- 

 iously watching the chaff leap to her amber spindle, 

 whether a degraded Indian of the Orinoco idly rubbing the 

 dry stalks of the Negritia to see them attract lint; whether 

 a Franklin striving to fathom the secret of the clouds, the 

 perception is the same, the effort to understand the same; 

 and the object of all is the deciphering of Nature's mes- 

 sage told in the amber and the vine and the atmosphere. 

 It is in intellectual force alone that the differences appear. 

 It is before the steadily augmenting power of the intellect 

 that Nature yields one by one the keys to her enigmas. 



Before those still unopened we may wait and wonder; 

 wondering as the savage Hurons wondered before the 

 magnet which the Jesuits brought to them; wondering as 

 the Greeks wondered before the mysteries of Samothrace; 

 wondering as we wonder now, when beyond the little 

 horizon of our knowledge we think we discern the great 

 dim shadow of the universal all-pervading force. 



Men wait for times, but times oftener wait for men. 

 The intellectual advance is not marked by the almanac, 

 but by change in mind. At its extremes stand the savage 

 and the sage not yesterday and to-day. So in the future, 



1 Faradav. 



