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SECT. XIX. 
XII. ON ELECTRICITY AS PROMOTING GERMINATION. 
Nymphs! your fine hands ethereal floods amass 
From the warm cushion, and the whirling glass; 
Beard the bright cylinder with golden wire, 
And circumfuse the gravitating fire. 
Bright from each point cerulean lustres gleam, 
Or, shoot in air the scintillating stream. 
Darwin. 
Haying amply considered the source and influence of heat on the seed, we 
are next led to contemplate the power of the electric fluid in promoting the 
progress of germination. 
It must appear surprising to every searcher after truth, that electricity, 
which is now allowed to be one of the principal agents employed in produc¬ 
ing the phenomena of nature, should have remained so long in obscurity; 
for, comparatively speaking, its existence was not known to the ancients. 
They were not, indeed, altogether ignorant of the peculiar properties of those 
bodies that we now term electrics ;* nevertheless their knowledge was circum¬ 
scribed, being confined to the observation only of those phenomena which 
nature presented to their senses, in the ordinary course of her operations; 
hence near two thousand years elapsed, before any addition was made to 
the little which was known to Theophrastus, and this branch of natural his¬ 
tory remained uncultivated, till the happy period arrived, when the philo¬ 
sopher was emancipated from the chains of hypothetic reasoning, and the 
uncertainties of vague conjecture. 
The existence of this subtle, and in most cases invisible power, was then 
traced, and many of its properties developed; its agency was discovered to 
be universal? and its extent unlimited. 
* Thus the ancients knew the electric power of amber, and of sulphur, upon friction, and hence 
the derivation of the term of this science from eXsKjpw, which signifies amber in Greek. 
