5 
JS 
ELECTRIC COEUMN. 
format the same times in the atmosphere, two fluids most 
essential in all the phenomena on our globe’s surface : the fluid 
which produces heat, the appellation of which among natural 
philosophers from time intiraemorial, was fire, or its correspon- 
dent in all ^languages both ancient and modern ; and the other 
fl.tjid, unknown till the beginning of last century, which has 
. been called electric fluid, from electrum, the Latin name of 
yellow amber, which has the property, when rubbed, to pro- 
duce the motion of light bodies, as do the bodies containing 
more or less electric fluid than the ground. 
Inferences Dr. Herschel, in his important analysis of the rays of tiie 
nahiMl^e^ects separated by the prism, has proved, that some rays beyond 
niaydej)endon the red rays of the spectrum, produce heat without being 
light, visible; and Dr. Wollaston having observed the spectrum at 
emitted trom the opposite side, has found some ravs, also invisible, which 
the sun and . ' 
hereafter tobc produce chemical effects. These two invisible rays undoubled- 
^j.bservcd. produce, in the atmosphere, some kinds of unknown 
fluids ; and thus manifest to us a store of future discoveries, in a 
field where we more and more perceive the want of known 
causes, to account for , known phenomena. Struck by the 
number of effects that the sun beams must produce in the 
almo.spbere, I have represented them, in a metaphor, as a 
bundle of c,uises (in French. rrr? faisceau cL causej which, when 
more studied and by new discoveries, will disclose many 
mysteries in which the physical phenomena of our globe are 
still involved. 
But _we are already informed, by the correspondence of the 
periods of the day in which heat and electricity increase and 
diminish in the atmosphere, that the ;sun beams form in -it two 
of the fluids the most efficient in terresli ial phenomena, fire and 
the electric fluid ; in which these beams, being united with 
some other substances, lose the faculty of being perceived by 
our sight ; as fire, being united with water in the aqueous 
vapour, or steam, loses the faculty of being perceived by the 
thermometer. 
Such are the results of experiments and observat’rons concern- 
ing the origin of these fluids, shewing how light enters into, 
their composition j but we have also in their decomposition, a 
farther 
