I confess I am quite at a loss to understand what there is in the doctrine here ascribed to Mr. Bain which was not known to the electricians who, from the time of Franklin, explained the phenomena of the Leyden vial. I may observe also that the mention of an "electrified atmosphere" implies a hypothesis long obsolete. The essential point in all those explanations was, that each electricity produced by induction the opposite electricity in neighbouring bodies, as I have tried to make apparent in the _History_[273]. Faraday has, more recently, illustrated this universal co-existence of opposite electricities with his usual felicity. But the conjunction of this fact with voltaic phenomena, implies a non-recognition of some of the simplest doctrines of the subject. "Since," it is said (i. 488), "common or machine electricity, and voltaic electricity may be considered for the present purpose to be identical, Faraday wished to know, &c." I think Mr. Faraday would be much astonished to learn that he considered electricity in equilibrium, and electricity in the form of a voltaic current, to be, for any purpose, identical. Nor do I conceive that he would assent to the expression in the next page, that "from the nature of a voltaic charge, the two opposite currents necessary to the existence of each other are both accommodated in one wire." Mr. Faraday has, as it appears to me, studiously avoided assenting to this hypothesis. 44. The next example is the one already so copiously dwelt upon by Sir John Herschel, Dr. Wells's researches on the production of Dew. I have already said[274] that "this investigation, although it has sometimes been praised as an original discovery, was in fact only resolving the phenomenon into principles already discovered namely, the doctrine of a _constituent temperature_ of vapour, the different conducting power of different bodies, and the like. And this agrees in substance with what Mr. Mill says (i. 497); that the discovery, when made, was corroborated by deduction from the known laws of aqueous vapour, of conduction, and the like. Dr. Wells's researches on Dew tended much in this country to draw attention to the general principles of Atmology; and we may see, in this and in other examples which Mr. Mill adduces, that the explanation of special phenomena by means of general principles, already established, has, for common minds, a greater charm, and is more complacently dwelt on, than the discovery of the general principles themselves.