Again, Addison, in the 241st No. of the _Spectator_, 1712, describes Strada’s “Chimerical correspondence,” and adds that, “if ever this invention should be revived or put in practice,” he “would propose that upon the lover’s dial-plate there should be written not only the four-and-twenty letters, but several entire words which have always a place in passionate epistles, as flames, darts, die, language, absence, Cupid, heart, eyes, being, drown, and the like. This would very much abridge the lover’s pains in this way of writing a letter, as it would enable him to express the most useful and significant words with a single touch of the needle.” After Strada and his commentators comes Henry Van Etten, who shows how “Claude, being at Paris, and John at Rome, might converse together, if each had a needle touched by a stone of such virtue that as one moved itself at Paris the other should be moved at Rome:” he adds, “it is a fine invention, but I do not think there is a magnet in the world which has such virtue; besides, it is inexpedient, for treasons would be too frequent and too much protected. (_Recréations Mathématiques_: see 5th edition, Paris, 1660, p. 158.) Sir Thomas Browne refers to this “conceit” as “excellent, and, if the effect would follow, somewhat divine;” but he tried the two needles touched with the same loadstone, and placed in two circles of letters, “one friend keeping one and another the other, and agreeing upon an hour when they will communicate,” and found the tradition a failure that, “at what distance of place soever, when one needle shall be removed unto any letter, the other, by a wonderful sympathy, will move unto the same.” (See _Vulgar Errors_, book ii. ch. iii.) Glanvill’s _Vanity of Dogmatizing_, a work published in 1661, however, contains the most remarkable allusion to the prevailing telegraphic fancy. Glanvill was an enthusiast, and he clearly predicts the discovery and general adoption of the electric telegraph. “To confer,” he says, “at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyance may be as usual to future times as to us in a literary correspondence.” By the word “sympathetic” he evidently intended to convey magnetic agency; for he subsequently treats of “conference at a distance by impregnated needles,” and describes the device substantially as it is given by Sir Thomas Browne, adding, that though it did not then answer, “by some other such way of magnetic efficiency it may hereafter with success be attempted, when magical history shall be enlarged by riper inspection; and ’tis not unlikely but that present discoveries might be improved to the performance.” This may be said to close the most speculative or mythical period in reference to the subject of electro-telegraphy.