Think it convenient answer back to send, The same course he may take; and, with his needle write Touching the several notes which so he list indite. Would God, men would be pleased to put this course in use, Their letters would arrive more speedy and more sure, No rivers would them stop nor thieves them intercept; Princes with their own hands, their business might effect. We scribes, from black sea 'scaped, at length with hearty wills At th' altar of the Loade would consecrate our quills. Another translation of the poem was made by Dr. Samuel Ward and published at the end of his "Wonders of the Loadstone," 1640. [Illustration: FIG. 27 The "sympathetic telegraph" from Turner's _Ars Notoria_, 1657] Ampère's suggestion, made, as we have seen, in the year 1820, was not the first proposal to use electricity for telegraphic purposes. Already, in 1753, a writer in _The Scots Magazine_, signing himself C. M. (Charles Morrison, of Greenock, according to Sir David Brewster, and Charles Marshall, of Paisley, according to Latimer Clark), outlined a method involving the use of frictional electricity; and Lesage, of Geneva, constructed a short experimental line, in 1774, consisting of twenty-four wires and a pith-ball electroscope. But the man who attained the greatest success in the employment of static electricity for this purpose was Ronalds, of London, who, in 1816, erected a single-wire line eight miles long in his gardens at Hammersmith, with a pair of pith-balls and a rotating disc for receiving instrument. When well satisfied that his system was practicable and reliable, Ronalds wrote to the head of the intelligence department in London urging the adoption of his invention for the public service; but he was promptly brought to realize the scant encouragement so often extended to inventors by persons in high places, that responsible official politely informing him "that telegraphs of all kinds are wholly unnecessary," and that no other than the mechanical one in daily use would be adopted. When penning these words, the representative of the British government must have forgotten the experience of 1812, when the result of the battle of Salamanca was semaphored from Plymouth to London, on which occasion a fog cut off the message after the transmission of the first two words, "Wellington defeated," the remainder of the despatch, "the French at Salamanca," reaching the capital only on the following morning! A rapid sketch of the life of our philosopher, whose discovery of the magnetic effect of the voltaic current in 1820 led to the invention of the electric telegraph, cannot be without interest.