y accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of
which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always
unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience
and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And
thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an
unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately
in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent
imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the
current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired
to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and
terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura,
and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various
quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching
its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a
sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak
which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the
dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained
but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the
tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the
shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld
anything so utterly destroyed.

Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of
electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural
philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on
the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of
electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me.
All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa,
Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by
some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my
accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever
be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew
despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps
most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former
occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed
and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a
would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of
real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook