"The ice crop of the Antarctic is much larger than that of the North Pole, but the volcanoes of Erebus and Terror are in violent activity. There are scores of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, from the double tide to the cold moon, that can be explained only by the electrical theory."
Thus I could fill a book with the recent proofs and statements of scientists which sustain the electric theory.
The dropping of an icicle into a barrel of unslaked lime once caused a great disaster in one of our cities. The slaking of the lime caused a fire. The firemen came and the more water they used the greater was the heat generated, until an explosion wrecked the neighborhood. In like manner, water in the fissures of the earth act chemically upon various minerals and produce similar results. Two or three layers of different metals in the earth produce a galvanic battery and results in the disaster of a volcanic explosion or an earthquake.
A silver dollar, a twenty-dollar gold piece, and a piece of copper of similar size, placed one on top of the other, with pieces of moist paper blotter between them, will generate sufficient electricity to send a telegram. Two iron tablespoons tied together with a piece of copper wire and their ends dipped in water will generate an electric current sufficient to send a cablegram across the Atlantic Ocean. So says Prof. Trobridge of Harvard. If this is true, what a fearful volcano or earthquake may be produced by water moistening the clay or substance between the thousands of acres of different mines or metals one above the other in the outer crust of the earth?
These things are marvelous to contemplate and paralyze the imagination.
CHAPTER X ELECTRICAL CREATION EXPLAINS NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Herbert Spencer says: "Science is partially unified knowledge; philosophy is completely unified knowledge," and the first knowledge obtained by primitive man was that of sense and inference from such experience. Later there arose a disposition to speculate as to that which lies beyond sense and known only by its effect on sensible things. This speculative propensity is worthy of the highest consideration as a means of knowledge. It has developed all of the numerous systems of philosophy which have flourished in the history of the human race.
First in the order of development comes the knowledge of things through the direct experience of physical sense, then comes imagination, reasoning, theoretic science and speculative philosophy.