In the Boston News Letter, of January 17th, 1745, the death of Josiah Franklin was noticed thus: "Last night died Mr. Josiah Franklin, tallow chandler and soap maker. By the force of a steady temperance, he had made a constitution, none of the strongest, last with comfort to the age of eighty-seven years; and by an entire dependence on his Redeemer, and a constant course of the strictest piety and virtue, he was enabled to die as he lived, with cheerfulness and peace, leaving a numerous posterity the honor of being descended from a person who through a long life supported the character of an honest man."

From what we have seen hitherto of Benjamin Franklin, it might with certainty be inferred, that if any particular description of natural phenomena should chance strongly to excite his curiosity, and leisure were his at the same time, he would go far in its investigation. During the last few years of the war, he was much relieved from the details of business by his excellent foreman, David Hall. But the war itself, one would think, gave him work enough. It was, however, amid the stir and excitement of putting Pennsylvania into a state of defense, that he entered upon that course of investigation which made his name familiar to all the world, and raised the colonies themselves in the estimation of mankind.

CHAPTER VIII.

ELECTRICITY BEFORE FRANKLIN.

IN November, 1745, at the Dutch city of Leyden, a discovery was made, partly by accident, which may be said, in the literal sense of the expression, to have electrified the scientific world. Before that time, indeed, no one had ever been strongly electrified, except the few luckless individuals who had been in the way when nature was discharging one of her own tremendous Leyden jars.

The Greeks, three centuries before the Christian era, had observed that amber and tourmaline when rubbed attract light bodies. Aristotle and Pliny both descant upon the torpedo, the electricity of which was used to cure rheumatic complaints in the reign of Tibe

rius. The sparks emitted from clothing, and from the fur of animals, were also observed by the ancients. But not another fact respecting electricity was added to the stock of knowledge until the year 1600, when Dr. Gilbert, of England, discovered that besides amber and tourmaline, several other substances possess the electric power, such as jet, diamond, glass, sealing wax, sulphur, sapphire, and carbuncle. He also discovered that many substances cannot be electrically excited; for example, metals, ivory, hard wood, flint, emerald, pearls, alabaster, and natural magnets. Lastly, he observed that in dry cool air the electrical power is excited easily and quickly; in moist warm air, with difficulty or not at all. At that point the subject remained until Otto Von Guericke, the inventor of the air pump, constructed about 1650, a rude electrical machine, which was merely a ball of sulphur mounted on a revolving axis, like a grindstone. By the aid of this instrument he produced powerful sparks and flashes of electric light. He discovered that bodies excited by friction communicate their electricity to other bodies by contact, and that electrified substances repel as well as attract. Sir Isaac Newton made an electrical machine of glass, and invented some amusing experiments, but drew no new inferences from them. Francis Hawksbee (who wrote in 1705), besides inventing a great number of brilliant experiments, noticed and remarked upon the similarity between the electric flash and lightning. Stephen Gray (1720), of the Royal Society, added numberless experiments, many of which were extremely ingenious. He also expressed a hope that a method would at length be discovered of collecting a great quantity of electricity, "which," he added, "seems to be of the same nature with thunder and lightning, if we may compare great things with small." Add to these, the detection by M. Dufay, of Paris, of the two kinds of electricity, which he called vitreous and resinous; and we have arrived at the Leyden discovery of 1745.

Thus we find that, for a century and a half, electricity had been studied in Europe by here and there an ardent votary, but without making much more than a show of progress. A thousand entertaining experiments had been performed and described. Spirits had been fired and gunpowder exploded by a spark from a lady's finger. Children had been insulated by hanging them to the ceiling by silk cords; men, by placing them upon cakes of resin, and both had felt the electric prick, and their hair to stand on end. A tolerable

machine had been constructed for exciting electricity, though most experimenters still used only a glass tube. Several volumes of electrical observations and experiments had appeared from the press. Nevertheless, what had been done was little more than a repetition, on a great scale and with better means, of the original experiment of rubbing a piece of amber on the sleeve of a philosopher's coat. Experimenters in 1745 could procure a more powerful spark, and play a greater variety of tricks with it than Dr. Gilbert could in 1600, but that was nearly all the advantage they had over him.

A vague expectation seems occasionally to have flitted across the minds of electricians, that the observation of electrical phenomena would, in the progress of knowledge, furnish some plausible answer to the question addressed by mad Lear, in the forest, to poor Tom. "Let me talk with this philosopher. What is the cause of thunder ?" To our ancestors this question was a complete baffler. It is sometimes amusing, and sometimes affecting, to read of their ineffectual struggles with it; which struggles, however, seemed to them by no means ineffectual. A hundred and fifty years ago, people spoke of the ignorance of past ages just as we now do, and often hid their ignorance from themselves, as we do, by giving a new name to an old thing. Doubtless, Pliny thought he had explained thunder, when he said it was only an earthquake in the air. Dr. Lister, we may be sure, was well pleased with his theory of lightning, which he said was caused by the sudden taking fire of immense quantities of fire floating sulphur. He also thought, that the only difference between thunder and earthquakes was, that the one took place in the air, and the other under ground. Franklin, in 1737, quoted these opinions in his Gazette, and evidently thought favorably of them; certainly he had no thought of disputing them.

Young Jonathan Edwards's explanation of lightning, as recorded in his diary about 1722, affords a fair and curious specimen of the ancient way of thinking on this subject.

"Lightning," he says, "seems to be an almost infinitely fine, combustible matter, that floats in the air, that takes fire by a sudden and mighty fermentation, that is some way promoted by the cool and moisture, and perhaps attraction, of the clouds. By this sudden agitation, this fine, floating matter is driven forth with a mighty force one way or other, whichever way it is directed, by the cir

cumstances and temperature of the circumjacent air; for cold and heat, density and rarity, moisture and dryness, have almost an infinitely strong influence upon the fine particles of matter. This fluid matter, thus projected, still fermenting to the same degree, divides the air as it goes, and every moment receives a new impulse by the continued fermentation; and as its motion received its direction, at first, from the different temperature of the air, on different sides, so its direction is changed, according to the temperature of the air it meets with, which renders the path of the lightning so crooked. The parts are so fine, and are so vehemently urged on, that they instantaneously make their way into the pores of earthly bodies, still burning with a prodigious heat, and so instantly rarefying the rarefiable parts. Sometimes these bodies are somewhat bruised; which is chiefly by the beating of the air that is, with great violence, driven every way by the inflamed matter."*

And even this was an advance upon the general way of thinking in the colonies. To attempt any explanation of what was popularly regarded as the literal voice of an infuriated deity, burning for revenge against the insects he had created, indicated in Jonathan Edwards a bold as well as inquisitive genius. The popular mode of thinking on this subject, is shown in a paragraph published in the Boston News Letter of June 12th, 1704. It was part of a letter to a "Person of Quality," respecting a storm that had lately raged on the English Coast.

"Terrible was it beyond any thing in that kind in memory or record. For, not to enlarge upon the lamentable wrecks and ruins, were we not almost swept into a chaos? Did not Nature seem to be in her last agony, and the world ready to expire? And if we go on still in such sins of defiance, may we not be afraid of the punishment of Sodom, and that God should destroy us with fire and brimstone? What impression this late calamity has made upon the play-house, we may guess by their acting Macbeth, with all its thunder and tempest, the same day: where, at the mention of the chimneys being blown down (Macbeth, p. 20), the audience were pleased to clap, at an unusual length of pleasure and approbation. And is not the meaning of all this too intelligible? Does it not look as if they had a mind to outbrave judgment, and make us believe the storm was nothing but an eruption of Epicurus's atoms, a

* Dwight's “Life of Edwards," p. 743.

spring-tide of matter and motion, and a blind sally of chance? This throwing Providence out of the scheme, is an admirable opiate for the conscience!" etc.

How true the late remark of Mr. Herbert Spencer: "It is demonstrable that every step by which Religion has progressed from its first low conception to the comparatively high one it has now reached, Science has helped it, or rather forced it, to take." And again: "The beliefs which science has forced upon religion have been intrinsically more religious than those which they supplanted."*

The Leyden discovery of 1745 was a stride toward the nobler, the "more religious" belief, respecting the dread electricity of the clouds namely, that it is remedial and beneficent; the manifestation of a Power that is benign always, malign never.

At Leyden, three persons were experimenting in electricity: Professor Muschenbroeck and Professor Allamand of the famous Leyden University, and Mr. Cuneus, who seems to have been an amateur in science and a friend of the two professors just named. These gentlemen were aware that the great obstacle to progress in the knowledge of electricity, was the difficulty of accumulating and retaining it. They used, for a prime conductor, a small iron cannon, suspended by silk threads. This cannon they could powerfully charge with electricity, but in a few seconds after ceasing to turn the handle of the machine, the electricity had escaped. The idea occurred to Professor Muschenbroeck that, perhaps, an electrified

*First Principles," by Herbert Spencer, pp. 102 and 104. Another illustration of Mr. Spencer's remark is found in the following passage from a sermon by Dr. Byles, preached in Boston a hundre 1 years ago: "If an Earthquake be caus'd by imprison'd Wind, which wanting Vent, rushes with a bellowing Roar under the Earth, and heaves up the Ground into Trembles, it must give us an amazing Horror to think this Subterranean Vapour must break out somewhere or other, and that we don't know but it may rush out under our Feet, and bury us all in one prodigious Chasm. If it be caused by Fires, which burn under us, and run in Rivers of Flame, which threaten to blaze out in the most dreadful Eruptions; it must fearfully surprise to think how the outward Convex Earth which is our present Foundation, is only an Arch, which as it were hangs over a fiery Sea; and that if it should once cave in, we should fall into a Boiling and Sulphurious Lake. It is the Sentiment of the best modern Philosophers, that the Earth is continually sapt and undermined by Fire; and its Vitals burnt with an hectick Fever, so that it is gradually preparing for the final Conflagration, when its extreme Surface will at last share the Fate that is now suffered by its Entrails. Doubtless those burning Mountains which throw out of their Caverns perpetual Flames and Cinder, and sometimes Vomit Rivers of melted materials, have numerous Sources from all parts of this Globe, which still supply them with fresh and eternal Recruits. So that an Earthquake must needs give us some natural Expectation and Image of those last tremendous Convulsions when this large and spacious Arch which is stretch'd over the Hollow that is under it, shall descend down with a mighty noise, and the Waves of Fire breaking out, shall boil over it.”