A few years since, an account was published throughout this country and Europe, of a prodigy in the shape of an _electrical girl_ in Paris, who was indued with an extraordinary power--_electrical_ of course--by which, when she attempted to sit down in a chair, it was thrown from her with great violence. This was one of the wonders of the day, and after having deceived multitudes, and become an object of universal interest and sympathy, she fell into the hands of a select committee of the Academy of Sciences, with Arago at their head. Does any one suppose that Arago ever entertained for a moment the idea of electrical action in this connection? Not at all! Arago immediately set himself to the examination of the girls heels, and soon found that she moved the chairs by muscular effort. By long practice she had acquired such skill and power of kicking, or thrusting the chair away from herself, that it was always done without exhibiting any motion exterior to her dress, or the slightest disturbance of her person. So much for electricity or the "_new fluid_" in this case. This kicking girl was styled the _Electrical girl_, or the _Electrical wonder_. Of course she belonged to the _new fluid class_, for no one acquainted with the laws of electricity, would have entertained a suspicion that electricity had any thing to do with the phenomenon. We may be accused of being somewhat dogmatical in this treatise, and perhaps we are so, while we have to deal with so many fanatics and pragmatical philomaths. For the superstitious and ignorant, we have some charity, but we confess that we have little or no patience for those among educated men, who are wearers of the _amulets_ of electricity, magnetism, or _new fluids_. They evince more pedantry than penetration, and are inexcusable disseminators of sophistry and error. They are exactly in the category of the believers in perpetual motion, and, in fact, the ascription of such phenomena as table-tippings to electricity, magnetism, or some new fluid, goes a step beyond perpetual motion, if that is possible. Most of the plodders after perpetual motion expect to get, by some new adjustment, a machine that will barely move of itself without any great surplus of power; but according to this new table-tipping philosophy, we certainly should look for any amount of horse power, without any consumption of material, and no other expense than that of keeping a clever medium at hand. On the principle of touching a heavy table _lightly_ (for the touch must be light according to rule), and thus causing by incantations the table to tip, rise up, whirl about, etc., it would cost but little to move a church or a mountain, and mediums should be in great demand for mechanical purposes, as being cheaper and safer than steam engines. How strange it does appear, that these pseudo-philosophers have entirely lost sight of the one great radical principle of all dynamic science, viz., that action and reaction are