48 Electric and Magnetic Science 



writes,* " is in all bodies, more or less, as well as electrical fire. 

 Perhaps they may be different modifications of the same 

 element ; or they may be different elements. The latter is by 

 some suspected. If they are different things, yet they may and 

 do subsist together in the same body." 



Franklin's work did not at first receive from European 

 philosophers the attention which it deserved ; although Watson 

 generously endeavoured to make the colonial writer's merits 

 known,f and inserted some of Franklin's letters in one of his own 

 papers communicated to the Eoyal Society. But an account of 

 Franklin's discoveries, which had been printed in England, 

 happened to fall into the hands of the naturalist Buffon, who was 

 so much impressed that he secured the issue of a French transla- 

 tion of the work ; and it was this publication which, as we have 

 seen, gave such offence to Nollet. The success of a plan proposed 

 by Franklin for drawing lightning from the clouds soon engaged 

 public attention everywhere; and in a short time the triumph 

 of the one-fluid theory of electricity, as the hypothesis of 

 Watson and Franklin is generally called, was complete. Collet, 

 who was obdurate, "lived to see himself the last of his sect, 

 except Monsieur B of Paris, his eleve and immediate 

 disciple." J 



The theory of effluvia was finally overthrown, and replaced 

 by that of action at a distance, by the labours of one of 

 Franklin's continental followers, Francis Ulrich Theodore 

 Aepinus (&. 1724, d. 1802). The doctrine that glass is 

 impermeable to electricity, which had formed the basis of 

 Franklin's theory of the Ley den phial, was generalized by Aepinus|| 

 and his co-worker Johann Karl Wilcke (5. 1732, d. 1796) 

 into the law that all non-conductors are impermeable to the 



* Letter v. 



Cx_- tPhil. Trans, xlvii, p. 202. Watson agreed with Nollet in rejecting Franklin's 

 J theory of the impermeability of glass. 

 J Franklin's Autobiography. 



This philosopher's surname had been hellenized from its original form Hoeck 

 to alveivos by one of his ancestors, a distinguished theologian. 



|| F. V. T. Aepinus Tentamen Thcoriae Elcctricitatis et Magnetismi : 

 St. Petersburg, 1759. 



