fully studied. Probably one or more of the group,
dwelling on the observations which Galvani, an Italian, had made known
some twenty years before, developed views on the connection of electricity
with the phenomena of living bodies. Possibly one of them was exciting the
rest by telling how he had just heard that a professor at Pavia, one
Volta, had discovered that electricity could be produced, not only by
rubbing together particular bodies, but by the simple contact of two
metals, and had thereby explained Galvani's remarkable results. For,
indeed, as we shall hear from Professor Fleming, it was in that very year,
1799, that electricity as we now know it took its birth. It was then that
Volta brought to light the apparently simple truths out of which so much
has sprung. The world, it is true, had to wait for yet some twenty years
before both the practical and theoretic worth of Volta's discovery became
truly pregnant under the fertilizing influence of another discovery. The
loadstone and its magnetic virtues had, like the electrifying power of
rubbed amber, long been an old story. But, save for the compass, not much
had come from it. And even Volta's discovery might have long remained
relatively barren had it been left to itself. When, however, in 1819,
Oersted made known his remarkable observations on the relations of
electricity to magnetism, he made the contact needed for the flow of a new
current of ideas. And it is perhaps not too much to say that those ideas,
developing during the years of the rest of the century with an
ever-accelerating swiftness, have wholly changed man's material relations
to the circumstances of life, and at the same time carried him far in his
knowledge of the nature of things.

Of all the various branches of science, none perhaps is to-day, none for
these many years past has been, so well known to, even if not understood
by, most people as that of geology. Its practical lessons have brought
wealth to many; its fairy tales have brought delight to more; and round it
hovers the charm of danger, for the conclusions to which it leads touch on
the nature of man's beginning.

In 1799 the science of geology, as we now know it, was struggling into
birth. There had been from of old cosmogonies, theories as to how the
world had taken shape out of primeval chaos. In that fresh spirit which
marked the zealous search after natural knowledge pursued in the middle
and latter part of the seventeenth centur