and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no single
record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hair
is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century.
For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to
think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself
to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,
before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was
Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains
with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began
the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal
presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere
little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected
perhaps with magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning.
Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except
for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before
electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into
the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century
between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over
traction, it ousted every other form of household heating,
abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the
telephotograph....

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution
had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a
scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these
subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he
says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time
when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat
at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very
seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not
want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't write
all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'

'Yes!' said his father.

'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he