some
of the peculiar manifestations in electrified tubes, and noticing their
resemblance to "northern lights," was one of the first, if not the
first, to suggest that the aurora borealis is of electric origin.

These spectacular demonstrations had the effect of calling public
attention to the fact that electricity is a most wonderful and
mysterious thing, to say the least, and kept both scientists and laymen
agog with expectancy. Bose himself was aflame with excitement, and so
determined in his efforts to produce still stronger electric currents,
that he sacrificed the tube of his twenty-foot telescope for the
construction of a mammoth electrical machine. With this great machine a
discharge of electricity was generated powerful enough to wound the skin
when it happened to strike it.

Until this time electricity had been little more than a plaything of the
scientists--or, at least, no practical use had been made of it. As it
was a practising physician, Gilbert, who first laid the foundation for
experimenting with the new substance, so again it was a medical man who
first attempted to put it to practical use, and that in the field of his
profession. Gottlieb Kruger, a professor of medicine at Halle in 1743,
suggested that electricity might be of use in some branches of medicine;
and the year following Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein made a first
experiment to determine the effects of electricity upon the body. He
found that "the action of the heart was accelerated, the circulation
increased, and that muscles were made to contract by the discharge": and
he began at once administering electricity in the treatment of certain
diseases. He found that it acted beneficially in rheumatic affections,
and that it was particularly useful in certain nervous diseases, such
as palsies. This was over a century ago, and to-day about the most
important use made of the particular kind of electricity with which
he experimented (the static, or frictional) is for the treatment of
diseases affecting the nervous system.

By the middle of the century a perfect mania for making electrical
machines had spread over Europe, and the whirling, hand-rubbed globes
were gradually replaced by great cylinders rubbed by woollen cloths or
pads, and generating an "enormous power of electricity." These cylinders
were run by belts and foot-treadles, and gave a more powerful, constant,
and satisfactory current than known heretofore. While making experiments