25 
ON THE NATURE OF ELECTRICITY. 
By R. LAMING, M.R.C.S. 
HAT is that marvellous agency which conveys our 
messages along a thousand miles of wire in fewer 
seconds than by the fleetest mail they could be carried in 
days; which, if dispatched westward on a Journey to the 
Antipodes to day would arrive there yesterday, beating in 
its speed the velocity of time? That laughs to scorn the 
clumsiness of the best artisans in overlaying with the noble 
metals those of baser sort, furnishing our side-boards, at 
the cost of a few pounds with useful garniture, perfect in 
appearancé as the silver it economises and more secure 
from misappropriation? That performs at our bidding 
numerous other feats of importance which, but an age or 
two ago, would have been thought possible only to: 
professors of the black art? And of which—greatest 
mystery of all!_the public at large, professors and utilita- 
rians together, pretend to know not even the nature? 
What is electricity? Cannot something be done by way 
of answering the question; for it is impossible to believe 
the universal ignorance is willingly submitted to, or that 
the world would long treat it with indifference if men could 
only be made aware of the possibility of dispelling it. 
If any one who has just made himself acquainted with 
chemistry, as it is taught now in the year of grace, 1866, 
will take the trouble to compare what he knows with the 
chemistry as propounded by Professor Thomas Thomson 
in the “ Encylopedia Brittanica” of 1803, he will probably 
be astounded at the transition of the science in so short a 
time from a state of unpromising obscurity into one per- 
fectly satisfactory in its perspicuity ; so vastly does it differ 
from what it was some half century ago—not only in its 
extent, but in the character of its information—in the 
minute detail with which its new facts are continually 
being added to its now abounding stores, and in the 
rigorous scrutiny of the facts on which their reciprocal 
relations are worked out by inductive reasoning. Now, 
what it is instructive for us to remark is, that all this 
change has been consequent on a single mental conception, 
sudden, of course, in its occurrence as all new ideas must be, 
given unexpectedly to the world by an amateur chemist, 
then a poor teacher of mathematics, though afterwards 
aggrandized by an university and made independent by 
