102 HISTORY OF GALVANISM. 



comparing his own theory with that in which the 

 voltaic wire is assimilated to a collection of trans- 

 verse magnets, he was also able to prove that no 

 such assemblage of forces acting to and from fixed 

 points, as the forces of magnets do act, could pro- 

 duce a continued motion like that discovered by 

 Faraday. This, indeed, was only the well-known 

 demonstration of the impossibility of a perpetual 

 motion. If, instead of a collection of magnets, the 

 adverse theorists had spoken of a magnetic current, 

 they might probably interpret their expressions so 

 as to explain the facts ; that is, if they considered 

 every element of such a current as a magnet, and 

 consequently, every point of it as being a north and 

 a south pole at the same instant. But to introduce 

 such a conception of a magnetic current was to 

 abandon all the laws of magnetic action hitherto 

 established ; and consequently to lose all that gave 

 the hypothesis its value. The idea of an electric 

 current, on the other hand, was so far from being a 

 new and hazardous assumption, that it had already 

 been forced upon philosophers from the time of 

 Volta ; and in this current, the relation of preceding 

 and succeeding, which necessarily existed between 

 the extremities of any element, introduced that 

 relative polarity on which the success of the expla- 

 nations of the facts depended. And thus in this 

 controversy, the theory of Ampere has a great and 

 imdeniable superiority over the rival hypotheses. 



