Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/90

80 and Mrs. B, of New Hampshire, this power was first discovered during the imminence of a thunder-storm. Human electrometers are sometimes met with. A young man named William Chapman, of Providence, R. I., was stunned by the shock of a stroke of lightning which struck his father's house. The current passed through his body and went out at his right heel, which was painful for some time afterward. On every occasion of a thunderstorm since then he feels, hours before the time, a tingling pain in the heel. Young Chapman would be a valuable acquisition to the Signal Service as a portable electrometer, and, if he can do as well as he is said to have done on certain occasions, he would be ahead of any device that science has yet lighted upon to foretell an electrical storm.

A remarkable instance of the salutary effects of atmospheric electricity on the human body is told by the Wolverhampton correspondent of the London "Times." He states that during a thunder-storm a collier named Bates, who had lost his sight through an accident, was being led home, when a flash of lightning was reflected on the spectacles he was wearing to conceal his disfigurement. After the peal of thunder which followed he complained of pain in his head. The next moment, to his surprise, he found that he had regained possession of his eye-sight. The occurrence caused considerable excitement in the locality.

Since the date of Galvani's discovery, there have been many persons sufficiently bold to assert the identity of electricity and life. Even before that period, the observance of electric phenomena in man had been a subject of popular interest. In his "History of Electricity," Priestley relates that drawing a spark from a living body "makes a principal part of the diversion of gentlemen and ladies who come to see experiments in electricity." Doubtless the diversion was not lessened by the fact that the "electrical kiss" was a favorite form of the experiment.

The excitement in Paris, Edinburgh, and other cities, following the application of galvanic electricity to dead bodies, was of a very startling character, many supposing that the secrets of life were about to be yielded up by this wonderful fluid. Bonaparte, it is said, after witnessing experiments in voltaic electrolysis, remarked to his physician, Corvisart: "Here, doctor, is the image of life; the vertebral column is the pile, the liver is the negative, the bladder the positive pole." Though much has been discovered since that statement was made, but a modicum of the truth probably is known.

Perhaps the developed man of the future, in his physiological relations to the universe, may exemplify the magnet, whose forces are exerted constantly as received without seeming detriment to its substance.