i o Introduction 



scription of the effects of the live fish, to warrant the hypothesis that the 

 shock of the real torpedo may also be an electrical phenomenon. 



I have now related all that I have been able to ascertain of the external . 

 history of Cavendish, in so far as it bears on his electrical researches. We 

 must in the next place consider the record of these researches the two 

 papers in the Philosophical Transactions, which are here reprinted, and 

 the manuscripts now first published. 



CAVENDISH'S WRITINGS ON ELECTRICITY 



In the Philosophical Transactions for 1771 there is a paper entitled 

 "An attempt to explain some of the principal Phaenomena of Electricity 

 by Means of an Elastic Fluid: By the Honourable Henry Cavendish, 

 F.R.S." [Read Dec. 19, 1771, and Jan. 9, 1772, pp. 584-677.] This paper 

 and that on the Torpedo (Phil. Trans. 1776) are the only publications of 

 Cavendish relating to electricity. 



Dr George Wilson, however, in his Life of Cavendish* says, 



Besides his two published papers on electricity, Cavendish has left behind 

 him some twenty packets of manuscript essays, more or less complete, on 

 Mathematical and Experimental Electricity. These papers are at present in 

 the hands of Sir W. Snow Harris, who most kindly sent me an abstract of them, 

 with a commentary of great value on their contents. It will I trust be made 

 public. 



Sir W. states that Cavendish had really anticipated all those great facts in 

 common electricity which were subsequently made known to the scientific world 

 through the investigations and writings of the celebrated Coulomb and other 

 philosophers, and had also obtained the more immediate results of experiments 

 of a refined kind instituted in our own day. 



Sir William Thomson, to whom Sir William Snow Harris showed some 

 of Cavendish's results, thus speaks of them in a note dated Plymouth, 

 Monday, July 2, 1849. 



Sir William Snow Harris has been showing me Cavendish's unpublished 

 MSS., put in his hands by Lord Burlington, and his work upon them; a most 

 valuable mine of results. I find already that the capacity of a disc (circular) 



was determined experimentally by Cavendish as of that of a sphere of 



2 & 



same radius. Now we have capacity of disc = -a = _ ' 



It is much to be desired that those manuscripts of Cavendish should be 

 published complete; or, at all events, that their safe keeping and accessibility 

 should be secured to the world f. 



* Works of the Cavendish Society, vol. i. Life of Cavendish, by George Wilson, 

 M.D.. F.R.S.E., London, 1851, p. 469. 



f Reprint of Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism, 235, foot-note. 



