"Vulcan fills his furnaces with two sorts of thunderbolts. The one never wanders, and it is that which comes direct from Olympus. The other diverges in its route, and only spends itself on mountains; it is often even altogether dissipated. It is this last alone which proceeds from Jupiter." Was the subject of this fable, which La Fontaine put into bad verse so different from his general style, given to him? Would it infer that the ministers of Louis XIV. were inflexible, and that the king pardoned? Crébillon, in his academical discourse in foreign verse, says that Cardinal Fleury is a wise depositary, the eagle, using his thunder, yet the friend of peace: _Usant en citoyen du pouvoir arbitraire,_ _Aigle de Jupiter, mais ami de la paix,_ _Il gouverne la foudre, et ne tonne jamais._ He says that Marshal Villars made it appear that he survived Malplaquet only to become more celebrated at Denain, and that with a clap of thunder Prince Eugene was vanquished: _Fit voir, qu'à Malplaquet il n'avait survécu_ _Que pour rendre à Denain sa valeur plus célèbre_ _Et qu'un foudre du moins Eugène était vaincu._ Thus the eagle Fleury governed thunder without thundering, and Eugene was vanquished by thunder. Here is quite enough of thunder. SECTION II. Horace, sometimes the debauched and sometimes the moral, has said--book i, ode 3--that our folly extends to heaven itself: "_Cœlum ipsum petimus stultitia._" We can say at present that we carry our wisdom to heaven, if we may be permitted to call that blue and white mass of exhalations which causes winds, rain, snow, hail, and thunder, heaven. We have decomposed the thunderbolt, as Newton disentangled light. We have perceived that these thunderbolts, formerly borne by the eagle of Jupiter, are really only electric fire; that in short we can draw down thunder, conduct it, divide it, and render ourselves masters of it, as we make the rays of light pass through a prism, as we give course to the waters which fall from heaven, that is to say, from the height of half a league from our atmosphere. We plant a high fir with the branches lopped off, the top of which is covered with a cone of iron. The clouds which form thunder are electrical; their electricity is communicated to this cone, and a brass wire which is attached to it conducts the matter of thunder wherever we please. An ingenious physician calls this experiment the inoculation of thunder.