Philip Hale.
Archbishop Tenison's Library,
St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.
I have just met with a passage in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Sir Thomas Browne, wherein this invention is foreshadowed in terms more remarkable and significant, if less imaginative and beautiful, than that from The Spectator, to which public attention has already been directed, and which, I conceive, must unquestionably have been written, with this particular example of the "received tenets and commonly presumed truths" of the learned physician's day, distinctly present to the mind of Addison. The passage referred to is as follows:
"There is another conceit of better notice, and whispered thorow the world with some attention; credulous and vulgar auditors readily believing it, and more judicious and distinctive heads not altogether rejecting it. The conceit is excellent, and, if the effect would follow, somewhat divine: whereby we might communicate like spirits, and confer on earth with Menippus in the moon. And this is pretended from the sympathy of two needles touched with the same loadstone, and placed in the centre of two abecedary circles, or rings with letters described round about them, one friend keeping one, and another the other, and agreeing upon the hour wherein they will communicate. For then, saith tradition, at what distance of place soever, when one needle shall be removed unto any letter, the other, by a wonderful sympathy, will move unto the same."—Book II. chap. ii, 4to., 1669, p. 77.
Thus it is that "coming events cast their shadows before:" and, in the present case, one is curious to learn how far back the shadow may be traced. By whom has this conceit been whispered thorow the world? and in what musty tomes is that tradition concealed, which speaks concerning it? Kircher's Catena Magnetica might haply tell us something in reply to these inquiries.
In conformity with an often repeated suggestion to the correspondents of "N. & Q.," to the simple signature of my habitat, alone hitherto adopted by me, I now subjoin my name.
Wm. Matthews.