Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/37

 celerity, while others completely obstructed his passage.

Towards the middle of the last century, cylinders, spheres, and plates of glass, were substituted for the cumbrous globe of sulphur, and with these new implements man began to forge the chains which were to bind the subtle Spirit.

In the year 1746, an ingenious Dutchman actually managed to coax him into a glass bottle, coated within and without with metal, but the Spirit soon escaped from his narrow prison by passing through the limbs and body of the experimentalist, who received such a violent shock that he was compelled to take to his bed. This incident, however, did not deter the philosopher from prosecuting his inquiries, and his endeavours to construct a secure prison were eventually crowned with success.

Six years after this, an American sage summoned the now docile Spirit from the clouds during a thunderstorm, by means of a boy's kite, and thus proved the identity of lightning and that force which for two thousand years was regarded as an emanation peculiar to rubbed amber.

The nineteenth century was heralded in by the announcement of a still greater fact. A learned Italian now found that he could dispense with all the old machinery of incantation, and evoke the Amber Spirit by the action of acids upon metals.