ELECTRICITY

AND

THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH:

TOGETHER WITH THE

CHEMISTRY OF THE STARS;

AN ARGUMENT TOUCHING THE STARS AND THEIR

INHABITANTS.

BY

GEORGE WILSON, M.D., F.R.S.E.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.

OUR readers are all familiar with that beautiful production of Oriental romance, the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. He needed but to rub it to summon an almost omnipotent Genie, who fulfilled his wildest desires; and whosoever rubbed the Lamp had its Genie equally under his control. A deeper truth than its author probably intended, or than most of his readers have discovered, is shadowed forth in Aladdin's story. Some six hundred years before the birth of our Saviour, the keen-sighted, inquisitive Greeks had unconsciously realised the dream of the eastern legend. It was not by rubbing a lamp (although a lamp or any other piece of metal would have done quite well), but by rubbing a piece of amber, that they evoked an Invisible, and, as they believed, Living agent, which in our hands has done far more wonderful things than the genie of Aladdin's Lamp did, or could have done, for its possessors. The Orientals would have named this agent The Genie of the Amber; and such is the exact signification of the term we employ at the present day; for the word electricity, derived from the Greek name of amber, λEKTрov (electron), denotes, when applied to it as a branch of knowledge, the Amber Science, and when applied to the agent of which it treats, the Amber Force or Amber Power.

It was known to mankind, however, many thousand years before it received a name, or was developed by rubbing amber; and if we are to consider him the founder of electrical science who first observed an electrical phenomenon, then the honour must be assigned to Adam, who earliest, doubtless, of men witnessed a thunder-storm, and might have named the agency which produced it the Lightning Force.

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There were other natural electrical phenomena, also, less striking than the thunder-storm, but still sufficiently remarkable to awake and occupy the attention of mankind, during the ages that intervened between the occurrence of the first thunderstorm that had a human eye-witness and these days of the Electric Telegraph. The spectacle of such phenomena has in some cases been recorded, but more frequently no record was made. Thus the ancient Greek and Roman naturalists and physicians, such as Aristotle, Pliny, and Galen, knew that there occurred, on the Mediterranean shores, a flat fish like a boy's kite, or a skate with all its angles rounded, called a torpedo, which had the power of thrilling and temporarily benumbing the fisherman who trod upon it with his naked feet, as it lay half hidden in the sand. The dwellers on the banks of the Orinoko have, from time immemorial, had similar but even more vivid experiences of the power of the Gymnotus, or Electrical Eel, which abounds in the tributaries of that great river, to cramp the limbs of the incautious swimmer in these streams. In opposite quarters of the globe, accordingly, electricity must have been simultaneously recognised by the Italian fisherman and the South American Indian as a benumbing, convulsing Torpedo or Gymnotus Force.

Electrical meteors, likewise, including the Aurora Borealis, must have been familiar to the men of all countries and ages. The Roman historians, such as Livy and Cæsar, tell how the spearheads of a whole legion under march were sometimes seen in dark fogs to be each tipped with flame; and the ancient sailors

LIVING ELECTRICAL MACHINES.

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of the Mediterranean worshipped, as Castor and Pollux, the similar stars of fire, which were often seen by them on the mastheads of their vessels. They are equally worshipped by the modern Italian mariners, who name them the fires of St. Elmo. Longfellow, in his Golden Legend, makes a Mediterranean sailor say: :-

"Last night I saw Saint Elmo's stars,

With their glimmering lanterns all at play,

On the tops of the masts, and the tips of the spars,
And I knew we should have foul weather to-day."

In the Monkish Chronicles of the Middle Ages are descriptions of individuals, who at certain periods appeared, when lying in bed in darkness, to be floating or swimming in waves of fire. These descriptions are greatly exaggerated, as was natural in a wonder-loving, superstitious, credulous epoch; but they referred to a truth sufficiently remarkable, even when stripped of all exaggeration. The bodies of living men and of certain of the lower animals may frequently, by rubbing them, be made to evolve sparks and flashes, so that, for the time, they are literally living electrical machines. The incidental friction attending the pulling off of a tight-fitting stocking, or other article of dress worn next the skin, has often unexpectedly developed electricity, to the surprise and terror of the party who was at once the electrifier and the electrified. The mediæval chroniclers, indeed, may well be excused if their pictures of such startling occurrences are somewhat overdrawn.

The main condition needed for such electrical developments on the surface of the body appears to be great dryness of the skin; and hence they are seen best in frosty weather, when the amount of water-vapour in the atmosphere is at a minimum, and in the persons of those who, from natural habit of body, long residence in tropical climates, or other causes, have dry,