OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 339 



happy idea of 'bringing to bear the intense power of 

 the enormous batteries of the Royal Institution on 

 those substances which, though strongly suspected 

 to be compounds, had resisted all attempts to de- 

 compose them the alkalies and earths. They 

 yielded to the force applied, and a total revolution 

 was thus effected in chemistry ; not so much by the 

 introduction of the new elements thus brought to 

 light, as by the mode of conceiving the nature of 

 chemical affinity, which from that time has been re- 

 garded (as Davy broadly laid it down, in a theory 

 which was readily adopted by the most eminent 

 chemists, and by none more readily than by Berze- 

 lius himself,) as entirely due to electric attractions 

 and repulsions, those bodies combining most in- 

 timately whose particles are habitually in a state of 

 the most powerful electrical antagonism, and dis- 

 possessing each other, according to the amount of 

 their difference in this respect. 



(376.) The connection of magnetism and electricity 

 had long been suspected, and innumerable fruitless 

 trials had been made to determine, in the affirmative 

 or negative, the question of such connection. The 

 phenomena of many crystallized minerals which 

 become electric by heat, and develope opposite 

 electric poles at their two extremities, offered an 

 analogy so striking to the polarity of the magnet, 

 that it seemed hardly possible to doubt a closer 

 connection of the two powers. The developement 

 of a similar polarity in the Voltaic pile pointed 

 strongly to the same conclusion ; and experiments 

 had even been made with a view to ascertain whether 

 a pile in a state of excitement might not manifest a 

 z 2 



