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pursued for its own sake. The use of the compass was not introduced into Europe till the end of the twelfth century a.d., more than 3000 years after its first use in China. The importance which the science of electromagnetism has since assumed in every department of human life is not due to the superior practical bias of Europeans, but to the fact that in the West electrical and magnetic phenomena were studied by men who were dominated by abstract theoretic interests.

The discovery of the electric current is due to two Italians, Galvani in 1780, and Volta in 1792. This great invention opened a new series of phenomena for investigation. The scientific world had now three separate, though allied, groups of occurrences on hand—the effects of "statical" electricity arising from frictional electrical machines, the magnetic phenomena, and the effects due to electric currents. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, these three lines of investigation were quickly inter-connected and the modern science of electromagnetism was constructed, which now threatens to transform human life.

Mathematical ideas now appear. During the decade 1780 to 1789, Coulomb, a French man, proved that magnetic poles attract or repel each other, in proportion to the inverse square of their distances, and also that the

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