Travellers through a new region of science, like travellers through an unexplored country, too often think themselves absolved from the strict obligations of truth, and at liberty to amuse the public with romantic accounts of what they have heard and seen. About the time these experiments were going forward in England, the passion for the marvellous strongly discovered itself in relating some effects of electricity, pretended to be found out in Italy and Germany. It was asserted by Signor Privati of Venice, and after him by Verati at Bologna, Mr. Blanchi at Turin, and Mr. Winckler at Leipsic, that if odoriferous substances were confined in glass vessels, and the vessels excited, the odours and other medical virtues would transpire through the glass, infest the atmosphere of the conductor, and communicate their virtue to all persons in contact with it; also, that those substances, held in the hands of persons electrified, would communicate their virtues to them, so that the medicines might be made to operate without being taken into the stomach. They even pretended to have wrought many cures by the help of electricity applied in this way. It was affirmed that a man who, having a pain in his side had applied hyssop to it by the advice of a physician, approached a cylinder in which was concealed some balsam of Peru, and was electrified by it. The consequence was that when he went home and fell asleep he sweated, and the power of the balsam was so dispersed that even his clothes, the bed and chamber, all smelled of it. When he had refreshed himself by this sleep, he combed his head, and found that the very comb was perfumed. To see the wonderful effects of these _medicated tubes_, as they were called, Mr. Nollet travelled into Italy, where he visited all the gentlemen who had published an account of these alledged facts. But though he engaged them to repeat their experiments in his presence and upon himself, and though he made it his business to get all the information he could concerning them, he returned fully convinced, that in no instance had odour been found to transpire through the pores of excited glass, and that no drugs had ever communicated their virtues to people who had only held them in their hands while they were electrified. He was convinced, however, that by continued electrification, without drugs, several persons found considerable relief in various disorders; particularly, that a paralytic person had been cured at Geneva, and that one who was deaf of an ear, another who had a violent pain in his head, and a woman with a disorder in her eyes, had been cured at Bologna: so that from this time we may date the introduction of electricity into the medical art.