represent womanhood in all the perfection of her attributes, but
relegated by a mistaken fate to too low a place in the social scale.
Wholly loving, and consequently wholly suffering, she died young,
having thrown all her energies into her motherly love. Lambert, a
child of six, lying, but not always sleeping, in a cot by his mother's
bed, saw the electric sparks from her hair when she combed it. The man
of fifteen made scientific application of this fact which had amused
the child, a fact beyond dispute, of which there is ample evidence in
many instances, especially of women who by a sad fatality are doomed
to let unappreciated feelings evaporate in the air, or some
superabundant power run to waste.

In support of his definitions, Lambert propounded a variety of
problems to be solved, challenges flung out to science, though he
proposed to seek the solution for himself. He inquired, for instance,
whether the element that constitutes electricity does not enter as a
base into the specific fluid whence our Ideas and Volitions proceed?
Whether the hair, which loses its color, turns white, falls out, or
disappears, in proportion to the decay or crystallization of our
thoughts, may not be in fact a capillary system, either absorbent or
diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the
Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously reacting under
the impress of conditions as yet unobserved, were at all more
extraordinary than those of the invisible and intangible fluid
produced by a voltaic pile, and applied to the nervous system of a
dead man? Whether the formation of Ideas and their constant diffusion
was less incomprehensible than evaporation of the atoms, imperceptible
indeed, but so violent in their effects, that are given off from a
grain of musk without any loss of weight. Whether, granting that the
function of the skin is purely protective, absorbent, excretive, and