In singular contrast with the burst of applause with which the whole scientific world of Europe received the great discovery of Benjamin Franklin, was the extreme slowness of the actual introduction into Europe of lightning conductors. The opposition they met with in Franklin’s own country was trifling to that which they encountered in the principal states of Europe, more particularly in England and France. It was natural, perhaps, that the lower classes--ultra-conservative, through the mere effect of ignorance, in every country in the world--should see danger in the setting-up of iron rods which, as they were told, drew lightning from the skies; and it was, perhaps, equally natural that religious fanatics should regard them with extreme suspicion, as removing one of their imagined instruments of heaven for punishing sinful mortals. Both these classes, the untaught multitude and the bigoted zealots, opposed in Europe, as they did in America, the establishment of lightning conductors; but to the strength of these parties was unexpectedly added a third in a not numerous but powerful section of learned literary men. They were chiefly French, but had many adherents in England, as well as in Germany, the _savants_ of both countries looking then upon France as the seat of all science, and indeed human knowledge. The opposition raised against lightning conductors in France was entirely personal, its origin being due to the wounded vanity of a very estimable but likewise a very weak man, the already mentioned Abbé Nollet. Born in 1700, the Abbé had very early in life gained renown for his scientific researches, and after a while devoted much of his time to electrical experiments, in conjunction with two other celebrated men, Dufay and De Réaumur. When the report of Franklin’s discoveries arrived in Europe, the Abbé Nollet was generally looked upon as the greatest of living ‘electricians,’ and the general homage paid to him having roused his self-esteem to an inordinate degree, he got fiercely irritated that another man, a previously quite unknown person, in a distant land, should have dared to snatch from him his scientific laurels. Accordingly, he used all his influence among the public, in the scientific world, and at the French court, where he held a high position as tutor of the King’s children, not only to depreciate Franklin’s lightning conductors, but to set them down as something like an imposture. In various treatises and articles published in learned papers, Abbé Nollet sought to prove that the person called Benjamin Franklin--in whose very existence he formerly refused to believe, but which he now grudgingly acknowledged--was an individual unacquainted even with the first principles of the science of electricity, and that his proposal for protecting houses against lightning was so absurd as not to be worth engaging the attention of any thinking man. More than this, he argued that the proposed lightning conductors were not