TWO:Any other fireexcepting always in an ammunition magazineis easier to handle than one in a stable. It takes time to blind plunging horses and lead them out singly. And there is no time to take. Hay and straw[Pg 208] and gunny-sacks and the dry wood of the stable go up like tinder. It has burned itself out before you can begin to extinguish it.
TWO:In electricity great strides were made. Between the years 1705 and 1711 Francis Hawksbee published in the Transactions of the Royal Society several experiments, in which he had, for the first time, discovered the production of the electric spark by friction, and electrical attraction and repulsion. In 1720 Stephen Gray, a pensioner of the Charterhouse, published the result of his experiments on this subject, with a list of the substances which showed electricity under friction; and in 1732 he discovered the conducting property of non-electrical bodies. Before 1739, Dufray, keeper of the King's Garden at Paris, discovered the repellent power of two similarly-electrified bodies, and the attraction of these positively and negatively electrifiedor, as he termed it, possessing the vitreous and the resinous electricity. Cuneus and Lallemand discovered the mode of accumulating the electric fluid in what was called the Leyden jar in 1745. This discovery gave a new impetus to inquiry, and Nollet, in France, and Watson, in England, conceived the hypothesis of the jar being overcharged on one side and undercharged on the other. This growing perception of the positive and negative conditions of the electric fluid received confirmation from the experiments of Benjamin Franklin, in America. Franklin soon improved the Leyden jar into an electrical battery; and, in 1752, he proved the identity of electricity and lightning by his grand experiment of the kite. On this he recommended lightning conductors, which, however, were not used in England till ten years afterwards.He must be looking for his landing! Sandy called.
