60 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM. 
Read before the Astronomical Section of the Hamilton Scientific 
Association, December 4, 1903. 
BY DR. CHARLES I. KELLY. 
Mr. President and Members of the Hamilton Astronomical Society. 
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : 
I thank you for the honor you confer upon me this evening, 
and I trust I may say something which may be of interest to 
you. Our subject is Electricity and Magnetism. It would seem 
most opportune just as this, our electrical city, is celebrating the 
reality of the utilization of electrical power for commercial and in- 
dustrial purposes, that we should devote our time this evening in 
considering this mysterious force. I propose to divide my discourse 
into three parts— 
a. Historical Part, 
b. Elementary Part, 
c. Terrestrial and Solar Part. 
To yield the thunder bolt was the marked attributes of the chiet 
gods of old ; the lightning flash was the surest proof of the presence 
of divinity. Indra, the Jupiter of the Hindoos, was the god of 
thunder. The Etruscan tinia always yielded the electrical storm. 
Jupiter Tonans waved his thunder bolt over trembling Rome, and in 
every form of ancient superstition a belief in the divine origin of the 
most startling of the heavenly appearances lay at the basis of the 
national faith, When it thundered, the grave Romans dissolved 
their public meetings and the wise Greeks listened with unfeinged 
awe. ‘The gods spoke from the heavens in the rattle of the passing 
storm, or wrote their age upon the earth in the ruin of the lightning 
stroke. Some such sentiments of mysterious awe pressed upon the 
mind of Thales, when twenty-five centuries ago he probably dis- 
covered Electricity. A sage of Greece, the philosopher’s keen eye 
watched the minute phenomena of nature. His mind was eager for 
