William Sturgeon. 285 



* Descending to the earth we trace its circumfluent 

 streams polarising this vast ball of matter, on which we 

 are destined to live and perform all our actions, and 

 insinuating its resistless influence, in all the silent myste- 

 rious attractions of the magnet. 



' Trace it to the laboratory of the chemist, and we find 

 it the most active and vigorous agent in accomplishing 

 all those astonishing changes which give new forms and 

 new qualities to passive obedient matter. 



' Besides all these important operations of nature, 

 accomplished by the agency of electricity, it is capable 

 of restoring the dormant muscular and nervous powers of 

 man which have been prostrated by accident or disease, 

 and of giving new life and new vigour to every other mode 

 of medical treatment. 



* In plants also as well as in animals it is said to facili- 

 tate growth, and to give health, vigour and heart to their 

 general appearance. 



* Indeed so universally does the electric fluid appear to 

 be employed in most, if not all the grand processes of 

 nature, that there is not perhaps a plant that grows or a 

 limb that moves, but is in some measure influenced by its 

 powers. 



* Nay, it is perhaps this astonishing, this most gigantic 

 of physical agents, which is employed by the Great Creator 

 to spin the earth and planets on their axes, to sweep them 

 through the heavens in their regular periods of revolutions, 

 and to keep in uniform motion all those massy orbs of 

 matter which compose the countless systems of the uni- 

 verse. 



* Brief and imperfect as is the outline which I have 

 thus portrayed of the individual branch of science, perhaps 



