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26 On the Nature of Electricity. 
the Civil List ; who, by one act of sagacity, as by a fairy’s 
wand, turned a scientific wilderness into a garden, and the 
disorder of its material things into a numerical system. 
When Dalton conceived the happy idea, imputing to all 
the particles of elementary matter definite combining pro- 
portions, denoted by weight, in which, or their multiples 
only, they could combine to form compounds; he, in effect, 
did more for chemistry than any one had done before him; 
for, by that simple expedient study has been deprived of 
half its labour and students introduced to a view of corpus- 
cular action eminently suggestive of further inroads into 
the apparently complicated mazes of physical science. 
What the state of chemistry was before the days of 
Dalton, such is the state of electricity at the present time, 
in one respect, while in every other its condition is worse. 
It has an unbounded attraction with which electricians can 
do nothing ; with other forces in abundance all necessary 
for correcting it in one way or other, and in the real exist- 
ence of which no one believes. It is the universal convic- 
tion that something is fundamentally wrong in our 
electrical theories which must be set right before electricity 
as a science will advance a single step; and the amend- 
ment, whatever it may be, must come in the shape of an 
accidental conception which we are tired of waiting to have 
suggested, and yet have no means of hastening. Mathe- 
maticians have ascertained that an unlimited force of 
electrical attraction needs to be accompanied by a force of 
electrical repulsion ; and we have been taught accordingly 
to say that while electricity and matter attract one 
another, the particles of electricity separate by repelling 
each other. Facts had previously suggested the two 
antagonizing forces, for they were originally associated in ° 
the theory of the celebrated Benjamin Franklin, who had 
not used them long before they were perceived, by our 
neighbours on the Continent, to be incompetent to meet 
the requirements of observation, which demanded two 
forces of electrical attraction and as many of electrical 
repulsion. This addition, objectionable enough as a repre- 
sentation of nature, obviated one of the chief defects 
of the more simple theory; and, therefore, philosophers, 
professing to be led by their reason, had no alternative but 
to acknowledge the four forces, and thus accepted the 
French theory of Dufay. But, in course of time, as the 
observation of electrical facts extended, even that compli- 
cated system of attractions and repulsions became impotent 
