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PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY, 
canes, and earthquakes, are nothing else than explosions of electric 
fluid ; that is to saj^, of love compressed. . . Lightning is the kiss 
of clouds, stormy but faithful. Two lovers who adore each other, 
and who will tell it in spite of all obstacles, are two clouds anima- 
ted with opposite electricities, and swelled with tragedy. Youth, 
the season of storms, is not precisely an age ; it is the faculty 
which bodies possess, of gorging themselves with a larger provision 
of electric fluid ; which explains why there are young old people, 
and old young people, without counting those who are of no par- 
ticular age, and never have been of any. Experience proves that 
the silken hair, which is the most beautiful ornament of youth, is at 
the same time the most powerful natural condenser of electricity. 
Experience still demonstrates that elliptical and hemispherical forms 
eminently favor the accumulation of this fluid, and that angular 
forms on the contrary, allow it to escape by their points. Then 
we begin to guess why it is that the Creator has so profusely en- 
d-owed with this form the body of woman, and. why he has gifted 
her with hair so long and silken. A beautiful young woman is a 
true voltaic pile, a real magnet, in which the captive fluid is re- 
tained by the form of surfaces and the isolating virtue of the hair ; 
so that v/hen this fluid would escape from its sweet prison, it must 
make incredible efforts, which produce in turn by influence on 
bodies differently animated, fearful ravages of attraction. And it 
is then that glances kindle and that fires spread with an intensity 
inversely proportioned to the square of the distance. Science has 
never been able to calculate even approximately, the power of fas- 
cination, which is sometimes condensed in the eye-beam of a wo- 
man. The history of the human race swarms with examples of 
intelligent and learned men, intrepid heroes, grave and dull mag- 
istrates ; magnetized, seduced, transfixed, merely by a woman’s 
eye, conquei-ed by the childlike appeal of a look. 
Happily, this formidable power of fascination in woman has 
never commanded the extermination of the human race. On the 
contrary ; it is however not the less true that most of the revo- 
lutions of empires have originated in the electric stroke of a fan. 
A lover, in his twentieth year, asked me one evening whether I 
had ever witnessed the actual radiation and lightning of blue eyes 
