334 Ow Electricity and its Present Applications. [June, 
and said unto him, Give me the little book; and he said 
unto me, Take it, and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly 
bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as. honey. And he 
said unto me, Thou must prophecy, again before many 
peoples and nations and tongues and kings.” 
The variety of designations that are given to Electron by 
scientists is apt to perplex those that are not familiar with 
the subjea. These have been given according to the 
sources from which he can be educed, the forms he appears 
in, and the funaions he performs,— such as positive and 
negative, static and free, Voltaic, Franklinic, and Faiadaic, 
animal, friaional, and magnetic ; and many besides. But 
these names, like the roll of names often given to potentates 
of the world, all belong only to the one great Genie who is 
the subjea of our present discourse. 
The motions which God has given to the great oblate 
globe of the Earth must, we should expea, cause lelative 
motions on the part of such a mobile and ethereal substance 
(if substance it can be called) as that of this great Genie. 
We do not know the natural laws by which spirits are go- 
verned, but, speculating on their analogy to those which 
apply to the rarest of fluids and gases that we are acquainted 
with, we may to some extent be assisted to understand how 
such a spirit would comport itself in the world ; though even 
the laws of acoustics or of hydro-dynamics cannot properly 
be considered as altogether applicable to so immaterial and 
imponderable a being as Electron. 
The natural effedt produced on these fluids by the rotation 
of the Earth would be centrifugal at the meridianal circum- 
ference and centripetal at the Poles. In the case of the 
Eledtric Spirit, supposing, as some with reason think, that it 
has the slightest amount of gravity, the rotary motion of 
the Earth would, at both ends of its axis, tend to draw it 
into the interior, which it would penetrate and traverse as 
easily as if it were a hollow sphere, and, the motion of the 
globe being greatest at its equatorial circumference, the 
spirit would find its way there ; it would issue forth (re- 
freshed and invigorated by his passage through the central 
fire of the Earth), imparting warmth and fertility to the 
tropical regions, though often giving indications of his 
superabundant presence, by frolicksome outbursts, which 
are sometimes attended by disastrous consequences. And 
thence he would become diffused through and over the 
atmosphere, and so would find his way back to the Poles, 
there to be again absorbed, and to enter on what might be 
called his normal circuit of the Earth. Thus the Earth 
