Page:Hans Christian Ørsted - The Soul in Nature - Horner - 1852.djvu/17

xiv the practice of science to be a religious worship. Most of his time was besides occupied with lectures, which during several winters he delivered daily for five hours; some of these were in German, for the corps diplomatique. He introduced a monthly lecture, which he continued to the last, in which he gradually communicated and explained all the discoveries of the day on experimental Natural Science; he also about this time discovered a galvanic copper-cell apparatus (kupferkasten apparat), together with a new method to blast mines. In 1818 and 1819, by command of the king, he examined the Island of Bornholm, accompanied by the distinguished geologist Forchhammer of Holstein. This island had been hitherto neglected, but was mineralogically interesting, and rich in ironstone and coal.

At length came the year 1820, from which may be dated Oersted's great fame, and called by himself the happiest year of his life. He discovered "electro-magnetism," or the law of reciprocity between electrified bodies and the magnet. The actual discovery of this hitherto unknown law of nature, which already, in the few years that have since elapsed, has produced such extraordinary effects, was developed during a course of lectures a privatissimum, which in the winter of 1819 and 1820 was delivered before some of the provectiores (the more advanced students). The original idea, however, whose real existence now for the first time became a fact, he had carried in his mind for a long period, and even in the year 1813, in the above-mentioned work, Views of Chemical Laws of Nature, he had expressed his anticipation of the existence of a near connection between electric, galvanic, and magnetic currents. If galvanism, he thought, be only a hidden form of electricity, then magnetism can also be only electricity in a still more hidden form; and his efforts were directed to the inquiry whether electricity in a galvanic form might not exercise a perceptible effect upon the magnet. His continued