studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the

exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its

provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly

blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than

the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's

ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it

killed him, and he could notsee it as a thing that concerned him

enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any

dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.

It rotted his metals when he put them together… There is no

single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles

or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the

sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his

very successful best not tothink about it at all; until this new

spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have beenseen and dismissed as

unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision

came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who

first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and

silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the humanmind

to theexistence of this universal presence. And even then the

science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious

facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with

magnetism-a mere guess that-perhaps with the lightning. Frogs'

legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and

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