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merry wanderer of the night, Puck, who boasted that he could "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes," was a sluggard compared with the fairy messenger who now flies hither and thither at our bidding, with a velocity which might carry him round the globe several times in a single second. Four and twenty centuries have elapsed since Thales of Miletus evoked this nimble Spirit by rubbing a piece of yellow amber; just as the heroes of Romance summoned genii, fairies, and hobgoblins, by the friction of rings and amulets. The Greek name for amber was electron, and thus our Spirit came to be called Electricity.

The ancients were ignorant of the potency of this ethereal being; indeed, their knowledge was confined to the isolated fact that amber, when rubbed, acquired the property of attracting light bodies.

The grander manifestations of the Amber Spirit's power received a religious interpretation; thus, the forked flashes which sometimes darted through the