your hands on the cylinder, the forefinger of each
hand can drop into the water; each of the vessels
has a metallic plate, and communicates by wires
with a galvanometer with its needle. Now the
theory is, that if you clutch the cylinder firmly
with the right hand, leaving the left perfectly
passive, the needle in the galvanometer will move from
west to south; if, in like manner, you exert the
left arm, leaving the right arm passive, the needle
will deflect from west to north. Hence, it is argued
that the electric current is induced through the
agency of the nervous system, and that, as human
Will produces the muscular contraction requisite,
so is it human Will that causes the deflection of
the needle. I imagined that if this theory were
substantiated by experiment, the discovery might
lead to some sublime and unconjectured secrets
of science. For human Will, thus actively effective
on the electric current, and all matter, animate
or inanimate, having more or less of electricity, a
vast field became opened to conjecture. By what
series of patient experimental deduction might
not science arrive at the solution of problems
which the Newtonian law of gravitation does not
suffice to solve; and-——But I must not suffer
myself to be led away into the vague world of
guess, by the vague reminiscences of a knowledge
long since wholly neglected, or half-forgotten.

I was dissatisfied with my experiment. The
needle stirred, indeed, but erratically, and not in
directions which, according to the theory, should
correspond to my movement. I was about to
dismiss the trial with some uncharitable contempt
of the French philosopher's dogmas, when I heard
a loud ring at my street door. While I paused
to conjecture whether rny servant was yet up to
attend to the door, and which of my patients was
the most likely to summon me at so unseasonable
an hour, a shadow darkened my window. I
looked up, and to my astonishment beheld the
brilliant face of Mr. Margrave. The sash to the
door was already partially opened; he raised it
higher, and walked into the room. "Was it
you who rang at the street door, and at this
hour?" said I.

"Yes; and observing, after I had rung, that
all the shutters were still closed, I felt ashamed
of my own rash action, and made off rather than
brave the reproachful face of some injured housemaid,
robbed of her morning dreams. I turned
down that pretty lane—lured by the green of the
chesnut-trees—caught sight of you through the
window, took courage, and here I am! You
forgive me?" While thus speaking, he continued to
move along the littered floor of the dingy room,
with the undulating restlessness of some wild
animal in the confines of its den, and he now went
on, in short fragmentary sentences, very slightly
linked together, but smoothed, as it were, into
harmony by a voice musical and fresh as a
skylark's warble. "Morning dreams, indeed! dreams
that waste the life of such a morning. Rosy
magnificence of a summer dawn! Do you not pity
the fool who prefers to lie abed, and to dream
rather than to live? What! and you, strong man,
with those noble limbs, in this den! Do you not
long for a rush through the green of the fields, a
bath in the blue of the river?"

Here he came to a pause, standing, still in the
grey light of the growing day, with eyes whose
joyous lustre forestalled the sun's, and lips
which seemed to laugh even in repose.

But presently those eyes, as quick as they were
bright, glanced over the walls, the floor, the
shelves, the phials, the mechanical inventions,
and then rested full on my cylinder fixed to the
table. He approached, examined it curiously,
asked what it was? I explained. To gratify
him, I sat down and renewed my experiment,
with equally ill success. The needle, which
should have moved from west to south, describing
an angle of from 30 deg. to 40 or even 50 deg.,
only made a few troubled undecided oscillations.

"Tut!" cried the young man, "I see what it
is; you have a wound in your right hand."

That was true. I had burnt my hand a few
days before in a chemical experiment, and the
sore had not healed.

"Well," said I, "and what does that matter?"

"Everything; the least scratch in the skin of the
hand produces chemical actions on the electric
current, independently of your will. Let me try."

He took my place, and in a moment the needle
in the galvanometer responded to his grasp on
the cylinder, exactly as the French philosopher
had stated to be the due result of the experiment.

I was startled.

"But how came you, Mr. Margrave, to be so
well acquainted with a scientific process little
known, and but recently discovered?"

"I well acquainted! not so. But I am fond
of all experiments that relate to animal life.
Electricity especially, is full of interest."

On that I drew him out (as I thought), and he
talked volubly. I was amazed to find this young
man, in whose brain I had conceived thought
kept one careless holiday, was evidently familiar
with the physical sciences, and especially with
chemistry, which was my own study by
predilection. But never had I met with a student in
whom a knowledge so extensive was mixed up
with notions so obsolete or so crotchety. In one
sentence he showed that he had mastered some
late discovery by Faraday or Liebig; in the next
sentence he was talking the wild fallacies of
Cardan or Van Helmont. I burst out laughing at
some paradox about sympathetic powders, which
he enounced as if it were a recognised truth.

'Pray tell me," said I, "who was your
master in physics, for a cleverer pupil never had
a more crackbrained teacher."

"No," he answered, with his merry laugh,
'it is not the teacher's fault. I am a mere
parrot; just cry out a few scraps of learning
picked up here and there. But, however, I am
fond of all researches into Nature; all guesses
at her riddles. To tell you the truth, one reason
why I have taken to you so heartily is not only
that your published work caught my fancy in the
dip which I took into its contents (pardon me if