On the Nature of Electricity. 27 
to do what was required of it; and electricians of repute 
now lay it aside in disgust as extremely deficient, though 
they have nothing to turn to that is any better. While 
they have been deploring the barrenness of electrical theory 
and, for its improvement, conceiving additions of new 
forces or of new properties of force, adding evil to evil; an 
amateur has suspected that perhaps the electrical attrac- 
tion was too large, and required—like chemical affinity— 
to be made definite ; and who, working out the idea, has 
found it to dispense with the necessity of electrical repul- 
sion, and also with the duplicated system of Dufay, which, 
by departing further from truth, had made a.notable im- 
provement on the one electricity of Franklin; in short, it 
has enabled him to conceive a competent theory of electri- 
city in which there is no force but attraction acting between 
electricity and matter in definite proportions, and between 
the particles of electricity themselves universally and at all 
distances ; thus, while making electrical doctrine infinitely 
more comprehensive than it was before, approaching it 
very closely to the simplicity which we always expect to 
find at the basis of all nature’s operations. This extreme 
amount of simplification may have been unexpected, but 
it should not create surprise as our whole experience 
abounds with minor examples of the necessity of adjuncts 
for patching up means originally deficient ; it is only when 
means are from the first adequate that they need neither 
addition nor curtailment ; and it is in efficiency, combined 
with such perfection, that we have the only indication of a 
‘correspondence with nature. Science may depict her in 
too broad an outline as well as in too narrow a one, and 
when such is the case the remedy for the defect is to paint 
the portrait out and begin anew. 
It ought to be much more extensively known than it is, 
that electricity—the imponderable element of obsolete 
chemistry, and, it may still be said, of our present schools 
—has been weighed in the balance and found heavy. It 
is easy to understand that if its particles attract one another 
at all distances as alleged, they, being, as we know, univer- 
sally distributed in matter, must be a cause of universal 
gravitation; sufficing to be its only cause, provided their 
allotment to the varieties of matter, correspond in quan- 
tity with the respective weights, and which is quite within 
the bounds of probability. In the year 1838 an experi- 
ment was made in Paris to show the ponderability of 
electricity by suspending it, with proper precautions, from 
