But this is a digression, wrung from me by my righteous wrath against those who have done their worst to spoil for us The Angel’s Message, the first word uttered by the telegraphic wire under the sea.

Returning to the subject of Electrics I have something of interest to say which will be news to my readers.  One day when casually dipping into Addison’s Spectator at Albury, I made the following discovery which I recorded in the newspapers at the time, and give the extract now fully as thus:—­

In the 241st No. of Addison’s Spectator, bearing date Thursday, December 6th, 1711, and as signed “C.” (one of the letters of the mystic Clio), by the great Joseph Addison himself, occurs the following remarkable anticipation of our presumably most modern discovery.  Those who have access to the London edition of the Spectator of 1841, published by J.J.  Chidley, 123 Aldersgate Street, can verify the verbatim faithfulness of the following extract from page 274:—­

“Strada, in one of his Prolusions (Lib.  II. prol. 6), gives an account of a chimerical correspondence between two friends by the help of a certain loadstone, which had such virtue in it, that if it touched two several needles, when one of the needles so touched began to move, the other, though at never so great a distance, moved at the same time, and in the same manner.  He tells us that the two friends, being each of them possessed of one of those needles, made a kind of dial-plate, inscribing it with four-and-twenty letters, in the same manner as the hours of the day are marked upon the ordinary dial-plate.  They then fixed one of the needles on each of these plates in such a manner that it could move round without impediment, so as to touch any of the four-and-twenty letters.

“Upon their separating from one another into distant countries, they agreed to withdraw themselves punctually into their closets at a certain hour of the day, and to converse with one another by means of this their invention.

“Accordingly, when they were some hundred miles asunder, each of them shut himself up in his closet at the time appointed, and immediately cast his eye upon his dial-plate.  If he had a mind to write anything to his friend, he directed his needle to every letter that formed the words which he had occasion for, making a little pause at the end of every word or sentence, to avoid confusion.

“The friend in the meanwhile saw his own sympathetic needle moving of itself to every letter which that of his correspondent pointed at.  By this means they talked together across a whole continent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an instant over cities or mountains, seas or deserts.

“If Monsieur Scudery, or any other writer of romance, had introduced a necromancer, who is generally in the train of a knight-errant, making a present to two lovers of a couple of these above-mentioned needles, the reader would not have been a little pleased to have seen them corresponding with one another when they were guarded by spies and watchers, or separated by castles and adventures.