Chapter 1848

[←1837]

When Howard read, before the Royal Society of London, a paper on the first serious researches that were made on the aerolites, the Geneva Naturalist Pictet, who was present, communicated, on his return to Paris, the facts reported to the French Academy of Sciences. But he was forthwith interrupted by Laplace, the great Astronomer, who cried: “Stop! we have had enough of such fables, and know all about them,” thus making Pictet feel very small. Globular-shaped lightnings or thunder-bolts have been admitted by Science only since Arago demonstrated their existence. Says de Rochat (Forces Non-definies, p. 4): “Every one remembers Dr. Bouilland’s misadventure at the Academy of Medicine when he had declared Edison’s phonograph ’a trick of ventriloquism’!”