THE MYSTERY OF ELECTRICITY.
THE phenomena of lightning are constantly observed, just as electricity is constantly used in hundreds of ways through our inventions, yet no one knows anything about the matter,— it is just as mysterious as when the primitive man first saw it. A few years ago an ancient hemlock stood in a wide pasture lot in this city. Beneath its roots came forth a crystal clear and cold spring. For many years that tree had been the sport of the lightning; it had been struck again and again; and when it received its final blow, the event was witnessed. The electric force in a fierce storm came from below, not from the skies. The tree was seen to rend from root to topmost twig, and its ruins filled the pasture for fifteen rods around, in fragments from ten feet long to the size of toothpicks. It looked like a tremendous fountain for the moment. A dozen years have passed, the spring is degraded to a furtive passage underground, streets have been laid through the pasture, and the lightning has not since visited the spot. Let the scientist explain that. Not many years ago, in a thunder-storm, a little house in this city was chosen for a plaything by the mysterious force. Very little harm was done to the house,— just some splintering from the roof where it entered and from the baseboards where it went out,— but on the way the fluid—it was formerly called so—followed a gilt molding on which pictures were hung all around a room, stripping off the gilt, and doing the same indignity to every picture-frame. What has the scientist to say in explanation of that sportive work? It is nearly forty years since a church in one of our foothill towns was struck by a bolt in one of the briefest storms, whose whole local course was run in a quarter of an hour. In the midst of it a flash and crash came together, and the gilt globe of the church weathercock split in twain and fell to the ground. But the force rushed along the imperfectly insulated rod to the rear gable of the building, suddenly darted off half-way before the ground was reached, and tore a hole in the earth where it disappeared. Why did it act that way?—No one knows.