“To these may be added a curious passage in Signor Boccalini’s advertisement from Parnassus (century 1. chap. 46,) published more than a hundred years before the date of Franklin’s discovery, and in which the identity of the electric fluid and lightning is said to be revealed.” Miller’s Retrospect, 1 vol. page 24. But after attentively considering all these discoveries, we cannot help acceding to the opinion of the learned President Gouget, a man who had most thoroughly investigated the origin of science among the ancients, and we are fully persuaded that what he says of several other subjects is precisely the truth in regard to electricity.—“All (says he) which we read on this subject in the writings of the ancients, ought to be regarded as mere ideas advanced at random, without knowledge, without principles, and without any kind of foundation. If some of the ancients, for example, have said, that the earth was a spheroid, flattened at the poles; that it revolved round the sun; that the comets were planets, whose periodical revolutions were completed in a certain number of ages; that the moon might be habitable; that that planet was the occasional cause of the flux and reflux of the sea, &c.; we ought not to regard these propositions in their mouth, as the effect and the result of the knowledge which these philosophers had acquired. On the contrary, we ought to place them on the footing of those hypotheses which an uncertain and ill-regulated imagination daily produces. I say so, because none of the ancient philosophers have been able to give reasons for what they delivered; which we may be easily convinced of, by reading the manner in which the writers of antiquity relate the opinions of their learned. There we see, that the ancients had no reasons preponderating to adopt one system rather than another; neither were they ever able to give any of them the slightest demonstration. For the rest, I do not pretend to make this a matter of reproach to the ancients. They were destitute of all helps proper to acquire these branches of knowledge. If, nevertheless, they have sometimes hit upon the truth, we ought to attribute it to pure chance; and be sensible, that, as they wavered in uncertainty, and ran through all possible combinations, it is not astonishing that they should hit upon the true one, because the number of these sorts of combinations is not infinite. In this respect consists the characteristical difference between the astronomical learning of the ancients and that of the moderns. What at this time we affirm of the figure of the earth, of the system of the heavens, of the cause of the flux and reflux of the sea, &c. is not the effect of chance and imagination; it is the result of much observation, experience, and reflection, and every astronomer is able to support by reasons the system which he has thought fit to embrace.”