enabled our early enquirer to distinguish between a push and a pull.
Augmented experience showed him that in the case of the magnet and the
amber, pulls and pushes--attractions and repulsions--were also
exerted; and, by a kind of poetic transfer, be applied to things
external to himself, conceptions derived from himself. The magnet and
the rubbed amber were credited with pushing and pulling, or, in other
words, with exerting force.

In the time of the great Lord Bacon the margin of these pushes and
pulls was vastly extended by Dr. Gilbert, a man probably of firmer
scientific fibre, and of finer insight, than Bacon himself. Gilbert
proved that a multitude of other bodies, when rubbed, exerted the
power which, thousands of years previously, had been observed in
amber. In this way the notion of attraction and repulsion in external
nature was rendered familiar. It was a matter of experience that
bodies, between which no visible link or connection existed, possessed
the power of acting upon each other; and the action came to be
technically called 'action at a distance.'

But out of experience in science there grows something finer than mere
experience. Experience furnishes the soil for plants of higher
growth; and this observation of action at a distance provided material
for speculation upon the largest of problems. Bodies were observed to
fall to the earth. Why should they do so? The earth was proved to
revolve round the sun; and the moon to revolve round the earth. Why
should they do so? What prevents them from flying straight off into
space? Supposing it were ascertained that from a part of the earth's
rocky crust a firmly fixed and tightly stretched chain started towards
the sun, we might be inclined to conclude that the earth is held in
its orbit by the chain--that the sun twirls the earth around him, as a
boy twirls round his head a bullet at the end of a string. But why
should the chain be needed? It is a fact of experience that bodies
can attract each other at a distance, without the intervention of any
chain. Why should not the sun and earth so attract each other? and
why should not the fall of bodies from a height be the result of their
attraction by the earth? Here then we reach one of those higher
speculations which grow out of the fruitful soil of observation.
Having started with the savage, and his sensations of muscular force,
we pass on to the observation of force exerted between a magnet an