34 I^ISEN B V PERSE VERANCE. 



other, by a space around the lip of the vessel being left 

 uncovered. Whenever a communication was formed by the 

 mterposition of a conducting medium between the inside and 

 outside coating, an instant and loud explosion took place, 

 accompanied with a flash of light, and the sensation of a sharp 

 blow, if the conductor employed was any part of the human 

 body. 



The first announcement of the wonders of the Leyden phial 

 excited the curiosity of all Europe. The accounts given of the 

 electric shock by those who first experienced it are perfectly 

 ludicrous, and well illustrate how strangely the imagination is 

 acted upon by surprise and terror, when novel or unexpected 

 results suddenly come upon it. 



From the original accounts, as Dr. Priestley observes, could 

 we not have repeated the experiment, we should have formed 

 a very different idea of the electric shock to what it really is, 

 even when given in greater strength than it could have been by 

 those early experimenters. It was this experiment, however, that 

 first made electricity a subject of general curiosity. Everybody 

 was eager, notwithstanding the alarming reports that were 

 spread of it, to feel the new sensation ; and in the same year 

 in which the experiment was first made at Leyden, numbers of 

 persons, in almost every country in Europe, obtained a liveli- 

 hood by going about and showing it. 



The particulars, then, that we have enumerated may be said 

 to have constituted the whole of the science of Electricity, in 

 the shape in which it first presented itself to the notice of Dr. 

 Franklin. In the way in which we have stated them, they are 

 "little more, the reader will observe, than a mass of seemingly 

 unconnected facts, having, at first sight, no semblance whatever 

 of being the results of a conmion principle, or of being reducible 



