28 Ox the Nature of E lectricity. 
the arm of a balance; under the scrutiny of those well- 
known philosophers, Becquerel, Savary, and Pouillet, 
all members of the French Academy of Sciences; 
of which learned body the first-named was at the time 
president, and the two latter deputies, appointed to act 
on its behalf. The deputies, who alone were present 
at the first exhibition of that experiment, after causing it 
to be repeated some half dozen times, acknowledged its 
unquestionable success; and evinced their surprise at the 
result by immediately reporting it to their president, who, 
within a few minutes, while the apparatus was still undis- 
turbed, arrived with M. Edmond Becquerel to request 
permission to observe it also. M. Becquerel testified to the 
correctness of the report he had received, and sponta- 
neously added, “It is a magnificent experiment.” But, 
notwithstanding this official and equally important extra- 
official evidence, the result has been only privately circu- 
lated, and from that moment to the present, refused a 
public recognition, by those through whom the experimien- 
ter had calculated on its being made known to all the 
world; he had not foreseen that an experiment which 
demonstrate the non-existence of a second electricity, or 
that puts it, if existing, in the same category as the phlogzs- 
ton of the old French chemistry by making it a negation 
of weight, could never be agreeable to the national taste, 
however much it savoured of truth ; a motive for reticence 
which he might at the time have thought it uncharitable 
to impute, but which he was soon taught to regard as the’ 
true one by a Parisian professor, himself a member of the 
Academy, who had the courage to charge his colleagues 
with it in full assembly. By turning to the“ Comptes 
Rendus ” for 1839, vol. 1, page 830, we may find the text of 
the impeachment; of which the following is a correct 
though abbreviated translation, the names being suppressed 
for very allowable reasons :— . 
“This manuscript from the other side of the channel was 
returned to the Academy by a committee consisting of 
MM. Savart, Savary and Pouillet, with a note that no 
report would be made. The apparatus was constructed 
and put in action by the inventor, in the presence of MM. 
Savary and Pouillet, and also of M. Becquerel who came 
to witness the experiment in his private capacity. Its 
object was to weigh electricity which the experimenter re- 
garded not as composed of two different fluids, but as a 
simple material, ponderable by attracting its own particles. 
