THE SEXES OF ELECTRICITY. 
34T 
in the dark. A pleasant thing truly is the assurance of the aged, 
who no longer seeing clear enough to distinguish these beams, 
doubt their existence, and call them the hallucinations or illusions 
of youth ! 
Professors of the physical sciences, patented and protected by 
government, dare not say, the two sexes of electricity ; they find it 
more moral to say, its two They have a ^positive pole, and 
a negative pole; a vitreous- electricity, and a resinous electricity. 
The false modesty of gentlemen who do not blush at commerce, 
and who blush at the most beautiful works of God, astonishingly 
resembles the delicacy of black meats, which are refined by grow- 
ing putrid, to what is called game flavor. 
Life — the life of the adult is, then, the alternate separation and 
reunion of the two fluids, or of the two sexes ; it is the play of 
electricity. Death is the absolute neutralization of the two elec- 
tricities. 
Beings do not yet fully live while their sex is still latent, as in 
childhood ; life deserts them when electricity can no longer keep 
in their bodies, as in old age. The holy King David proved that 
he perfectly understood the condensing properties of polished el- 
liptical surfaces when he took unto himself the young Abigail as 
a body guard in his old age. Electricity does more than reani- 
mate the dying, it restores motion to the dead. I have seen it re- 
suscitate silk worms which had died of love, and make them love 
again. 
This truth admitted, let us apply it to the mineral. Even min- 
erals are not, as the vulgar suppose, inert bodies ; their life is only 
in a latent state. The definition of Linnaeus, miner alia crescunt, 
vegetalia crescunt et vivunt — animalia crescunt vivunt et sentiunt^' 
shows that Linnaeus had no clear ideas of the phenomena of 
growth, for growth is an agglomeration of molecules, solicited to 
unite by some power, and this power, this molecular attraction, is 
electricity. Now where there is electricity there is life. To grow 
is to live. Certainly, if you place a metallic stalk in some quiet 
spot, perfectly secluded from the breath of storms, where no dan- 
gerous influence may develop feeling in it, certainly then it may 
be considered as inert matter. But if by accident we should 
