594 



lovers prohibited or prevented from any letter connexion.'* It 

 is more surprising that such a long interval should have been 

 between the project of Strada and the practical realization of 

 its aims, than that the powers of electricity should have been 

 ascertained to be applicable to telegraphic piurposes, whereof 

 that surprising agent, magnetism, had been reasonably conjec- 

 tured to be a subordinate form, as well as hght and heat, and the 

 action of the brain itself a modification of the same intangible 

 and imponderable element. ' If mental action,' says the author 

 of the Vestiges of the Creation, ' is electric, the proverbial 

 quickness of thought, that is, the quickness of the transmission 

 of sensation and will, has been brought to an exact measure- 

 ment. The speed of Ught is about 192,000 miles per second. 

 The experiments of Professor Wheatstone have shown that 

 the electric agent travels, if I may so speak, at the same rate, 

 thus showing a likehhood that all the imponderable bodies are 

 ruled by one law of movement.' — (Sixth Ed, p. 294, notes.) 

 It had not, however, been found out for upwards of a century 

 and a half after Strada's death that ' simple electricity may be 

 artificially produced and sent along the nerves of a dead body, 

 exciting muscular movement,' and that it was capable of being 

 similarly transmitted along the wu-es connected with a galvanic 

 battery, causing motions corresponding to the former move- 

 ment. Galvani's first publication respecting his new discovery, 

 ' De veribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius,' 

 appeared in 1791. His death took place in 1798. The electric 

 telegraph, in short, may be regarded as having its type in that 

 wonderful corporeal mechanism which transcends all other mi- 

 racles of nature, and it may be considered as existing in em- 

 bryo in Father Strada's poetical project of an apparatus for the 

 rapid communication of oiu- ideas by means of magnetic mo- 

 tions duly regulated and determined." 



* Young's Tour, vol. i. p. 79. 2nd edition, 4to. 



