"Nevertheless I have convinced myself that these extraordinary phenomena are absolutely true, and by your leave, ladies and gentlemen, I will demonstrate a very few of them, and next time that we meet I trust I will show you some far more striking experiments, but that is only possible when I have convinced you sufficiently to have complete faith in me, otherwise the phenomena will not succeed. It is remarkable," he continued, "that whenever anybody makes a discovery, or an invention, everyone laughs him to scorn, and derides him either as an impostor or a madman. When Galileo looked through his telescope, and saw the mountains and valleys of the moon, all the people jeered at him. When he directed the instrument on to the planet Venus, and observed its phases, which demonstrated the fact that the planet revolved round the sun, the philosophers refused to look through his telescope. When in 1786 Jouffroy constructed a steamboat, he ascended the Saône from Lyons to the island of Barbe, he presented a petition to the Academy of Science, and requested the Minister of the Interior to take over his boat, but they all refused even to look at his invention. Seventeen years later Fulton ascended the Seine in his newly invented steamer and the Government officials condescended so far as to be present, but they paid no attention to it, and allowed the poor man to go away unnoticed and neglected. He went away almost heart-broken to the United States, and there made the fortune of thousands of people. "Professor Graham Bell went all round New York in the vain endeavour to sell a half interest in his newly invented telephone for 2,000 dollars. Everyone thought that he was mad, and he could not find a single person in the whole city who would risk £400 on his invention. To-day the Bell Telephone Co. has a capital amounting to millions of dollars, and the half interest which he offered would have made the lucky purchaser one of the richest men in the world. "When an Englishman once offered to light the streets of London by means of coal-gas conducted through pipes, everyone said that he was mad, and the Chancellor (Lord Brougham), writing to a friend in Edinburgh, said, 'There is an idiot here in London who says that he can light the city with coal-gas conducted through a tube.' Sydney Smith even asked the inventor whether he would not like to store his gas in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral? "But before long all the streets of every capital in Europe were lit up by this very means.