nothing decisive has been offered on the subject; and that conjectural modes of action have in this instance too often usurped the place of those to which a careful examination of facts alone can lead us.
(372.) Philosophers had long been familiar with the effects of electricity above referred to, and with those which it produces in its sudden and violent transfer from one body to another, in rending and shattering the parts of the substances through which it passes, and where in great quantity, producing all the effect of intense heat, igniting, fusing, and volatilizing metals, and setting fire to inflammable bodies; even its occasional influence, in destroying or altering the polarity of the magnetic needle had been noticed: but as heat was known to be produced by mechanical violence, and as magnetism was also known to be greatly affected by the same cause, these effects were referred rather to that cause than to any thing in the peculiar nature of the electric matter, and regarded rather as an indirect consequence of its mode of action than as connected with its intimate nature. In short, electricity seemed destined to furnish another in addition to many instances of subjects insulated from the rest of philosophy, and capable of being studied only in its own internal relations, when the great discoveries of Galvani and Volta placed a new power at the command of the experimenter, by whose means those effects which had before been crowded within an inappreciable instant could be developed in detail and studied at leisure; and those forces which had previously exhibited themselves
