The same elegant and correct experimentalist has shown that zinc and platinum wires, one-eighteenth of an inch in diameter, and about half an inch long, dipped into water in which is mixed sulphuric acid so weak that it is not sensibly sour to the tongue, will evolve more electricity in one-twentieth of a minute than is given by thirty turns of a large and powerful plate electrical machine in full action, a quantity which, if passed through the head of a cat, is sufficient to kill it as by a flash of lightning. Pursuing this interesting inquiry yet further, it is found that a single grain of water contains as much electricity as could be accumulated in 800,000 Leyden jars, each requiring thirty turns of the large machine of the Royal Institution to charge it,--a quantity equal to that which is developed from a charged thunder-cloud. “Yet we have it under perfect command,--can evolve, direct, and employ it at pleasure; and when it has performed its full work of electrolisation, it has only separated the elements of a single grain of water.” It has been argued by many that the realities of science will not admit of anything like a poetic view without degrading its high office; that poetry, being the imaginative side of nature, has nothing in common with the facts of experimental research, or with the philosophy which generalises the discoveries of severe induction. If our science was perfect, and laid bare to our senses all the secrets of the inner world; if our philosophy was infallible, and always connected one fact with another through a long series up to the undoubted cause of all--then poetry, in the sense we now use the term, would have little business with the truth; it would, indeed, be lost or embodied, like the stars of heaven, in the brightness of a meridian sun. But to take our present fact as an example, how important a foundation does it offer upon which to build a series of thoughts, capable of lifting the human mind above the materialities by which it is surrounded,--of exalting each common nature by the refinement of its fresh ideas to a point higher in the scale of intelligence,--of quickening every impulse of the soul,--and of giving to mankind the most holy longings. What does science tell us of the drop of water? Two gases, the one exciting life and quickening combustion, the other a highly inflammable air, are, by the influence of a combination of powers, brought into a liquid globe. We can, from this crystal sphere, evoke heat, light, electricity, and actinism in enormous quantities; and beyond these we can see powers or forces, for which, in the poverty of our ideas and our words, we have not names; and we learn that each one of these principles is engaged in maintaining the conditions of the drop of water which refreshes organic nature, and gives gladness to man’s dwelling-place.