As one travels over the archipelago he finds that superstitions vary, and what may be regarded by the Malays of the peninsula as particularly ominous may have no meaning at all with the Malays of the south or east. The Dyaks of Borneo are probably the most uncivilized of all the Malay tribes, for Mohammedanism has taken but little hold upon them, and their natural paganism remains as yet unshaken. Of their folklore we know but little. It awaits the conquest of the West, like the island itself.
ELECTRICITY FROM THALES TO FARADAY.
By ERNEST A. LESUEUR.
It is so common a notion nowadays that electricity had its birth and rise in the nineteenth century that it gives one a strange mental sensation to contemplate the fact that all the myriads of commercial applications that have of late years been developed in this field might have been made by the Chinese or the ancient Egyptians, so far as the potentiality of Nature for developing electrical phenomena is concerned. The writer used to know a delightful old gentleman in Vermont who once referred, as to a well-known fact, to Edison's having invented electricity. It is astonishing how closely his state of mind typifies that of a great many people.
In the form of the lightning, the aurora, and the shock of the electric eel or torpedo, electrical manifestations have been known ever since man commenced to observe those phenomena, but the fossil resin amber was the substance which eventually gave its name to the now tremendous agency. This material was observed, many centuries before our era, to possess the property of attracting light bodies to itself when rubbed with wool, and, being called ἤλεκτρον (electron) by the Greeks, transmitted its name to the property or force which it thus brought into evidence. The fact is mentioned as early as 600 B. C., by Thales of Miletus, although he does not transmit to us the name of the original observer of the phenomenon. Homely as was the experiment, it marked a beginning in electrical research.
Not that scientific investigations in that or any line were pushed very assiduously in those days, for there is a great gap between the discovery of the property above alluded to and the acquisition of any more solid knowledge pertaining to electricity. The phenomenon was at that time set down in the list of natural facts, and no attempt appears to have been made to connect it with others. The inquiring spirit of the present age can hardly be brought into more striking relief than by a comparison of the, at present, almost daily advances in scientific knowledge with the fact that twenty-two hundred years elapsed between the discovery of the above-mentioned power of amber by the ancients and the later one that a very large number of other substances, such as diamonds, vitrefactions of all kinds, sulphur, common resin, etc., possess the same property. A few other scattered facts were, however, also noted by the ancients: fire is said to have streamed from the head of Servius Tullius at the age of seven, and Virgil asserts that flame was emitted by the hair of Ascanius.
In examining, now, the history of the rise of electrical science we find, as just mentioned, the vast gap of over two millenniums between the discovery of the attracting power of rubbed amber and the mere extension of man's knowledge so as to include other substances. The philosophers Boyle and Otto von Guericke, who were active during the latter half of the seventeenth century, added a mass of new data in this line. Boyle, moreover, discovered the equivalence of action and reaction between the attracting and the attracted body, and that the rubbed amber or other "electric" retained its attractive powers for a certain period after excitation had ceased.
Otto von Guericke made a vast step forward by constructing the first electrical machine, in a crude form, truly, but which proved of the utmost service in adding to our knowledge of the properties of electricity. His machine was constructed very simply of a globe of sulphur mounted on a spindle, which could be rotated by means of a crank; the operator applied friction with the hand, his body receiving a positive charge, while the surface of the sulphur acquired a negative. The fact of the two electrifications being separated at the surface of the sulphur was not, however, known at the time; the only charge that Guericke observed being that appearing on the sulphur. The reason for this was that the latter, being a nonconductor, any electricity generated upon it was compelled to stay there, for a certain time at least, and consequently accumulated so as to be observable; whereas the opposite electrification flowing into the operator's hand continuously escaped to earth without giving any sign of its presence. Had the operator stood upon an insulating support, the electrification would have accumulated on his body as well as upon the sulphur. Guericke made the discovery that a light body, having been once attracted to an electrified surface, was almost immediately repelled from it, and could not be again attracted without having its imparted electrification removed by contact with an uncharged surface.
Sir Isaac Newton, about 1675, made an interesting application of a principle allied to this. He used a hollow, drum-shaped contrivance with glass ends and a very short axis, into which he put a number of fragments of paper. On briskly rubbing the outside of the glass with a piece of silk the paper was caused to "leap from one part of the glass to another and twirl about in the air." This was repeated in 1676 before the Royal Society, to the great edification of that learned body.