ELECTRICITY. JQ3 



ELECTRICITY. 



ALTHOUGH it has been reserved for modern times to bring to perfection the 

 methods of investigation pursued in physical researches, these great divisions 

 of human knowledge ha've nevertheless been always progressive. If the la- 

 bors of the ancients were obstructed, their advancement retarded, and their 

 productions disfigured by fantastical theories ; the facts they accumulated, the 

 phenomena they described, and the observations they recorded, have formed a 

 bequest of the highest value to the better disciplined inquirers and observers 

 of later days. Astronomy, the mechanics of solid and fluid bodies, and the 

 physics of the imponderable agents, light and heat, received severally more or 

 less attention at an early epoch of the progress of human knowledge ; and the 

 results of ancient researches in some of these branches of science, astronomy 

 for example, form an important element of the knowledge we now possess. 

 Electricity, however, is a remarkable exception to this state of progressive 

 movement. To that particular division of physics antiquity has contributed 

 absolutely nothing. The vast discoveries which have accumulated respecting 

 this extraordinary agent, by which its connexion with and influence upon the 

 whole material universe, its relations to the phenomena of organized bodies, 

 the part it plays in the functions of animal and vegetable vitality, its subservi- 

 ence to the uses of man as a mechanical power, its intimate connexion with 

 the chemical constitution of material substances, in fine, its application in al- 

 most every division of the sciences, and every department of the arts, have 

 been severally demonstrated, are exclusively and peculiarly due to the spirit 



) of modern research, and in a great degree to the labors of the present age. 



The beginnings of science have often the appearance of chance. A felici- 

 tous accident throws a certain natural fact under the notice of an inquiring and ) 

 philosophic mind. Attention is awakened and investigation provoked. Simi- < 

 lar phenomena under varied circumstances are eagerly sought for ; and if in ( 



( the natural course of events they do not present themselves, circumstances are < 



| designedly arranged so as to bring about their production. The seeds of / 



V 



