Anti Slavery Bugle

Almost Prophetic.

One of Addison's papers in the Spectator has been brought forward in a Western journal, as a fanciful foreshadowing of the magnetic telegraph. 'The coincidence, indeed, is remarkable; since the very words employed to describe the operation of the imaginary invention or agency are exactly applicable, so far as the principle is concerned, to the real invention now in daily use. Darwin's vague prophecy concerning steam and its future application to vessels and cars, was not so correct, nor half so beautiful, as an imaginative conception, as the following :]

"Strada, in one of his prolusions, gives an account of chemical 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 these needles, made a kind of a dial-plate, inscribing it with the 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 in the day, and to converse with one another by means of this, their invention. Accordingly, when they were some hundred miles assunder, each of them shut himself up in his closet, at the time appointed, and immediately cast his eye upon the dial-plate. If he had a mind to write any thing to his friend, he directed his needle to every letter that formed the words which he had occasion to write, 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 on 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."