ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTS 391 



plants from being new that they are more than 150 years 

 old. After this we shall be more ready than ever to 

 believe that " there is nothing new under the sun/' and 

 may even be prepared to entertain suggestions as to 

 the probable use of electricity in horticulture by the 

 Ancient Egyptians. 



After Mr. Maimbray in Scotland came the Abbe" 

 Nollet in France, and after him, again, the Abbe Berthelon, 

 who had the idea of collecting electricity from the air 

 and conveying it to the plants, probably prompted by 

 the success of Benjamin Franklin in drawing electricity 

 from the clouds and by the installation of lightning- 

 conductors. The Abbe Berthelon set up in the air 

 metal points like lightning-conductors connected with a 

 flexible wire terminating in discharge points, and satisfied 

 himself that the more abundant supply of electricity 

 thus discharged among the plants increased their pro- 

 ductiveness. 



At a later period other French experimentalists used 

 electricity, but conducted the electricity gathered by the 

 lightning-conductors to wires buried in the ground 

 among the plants. 



When we come to modern research into the effects of 

 electricity on plants we have to begin with the work of 

 a Swedish scientist, the late Professor Lemstrom, an 

 account of whose work was published in 1904, a year after 

 his death. It is recorded that Lemstrom was influenced 

 in part by the vigour of vegetation in the Arctic regions, 

 where the plants came under the influence of the Aurora 

 Borealis, that beautiful luminous meteor of the Northern 

 sky which is attributed to the ascent of positive elec- 

 tricity from the intertropical water surfaces flowing 

 towards the poles, and in the region of the poles de- 

 scending towards the earth and coming in contact, in a 



