Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation.

I will confine myself here to one example of this divining power.

By his most ingenious device of a rapidly rotating mirror, Wheatstone had proved that electricity required time to pass through a wire, the current reaching the middle of the wire later than its two ends.

'If,' says Faraday, 'the two ends of the wire in Professor Wheatstone's experiments were immediately connected with two large insulated metallic surfaces exposed to the air, so that the primary act of induction, after making the contact for discharge, might be in part removed from the internal portion of the wire at the first instance, and disposed for the moment on its surface jointly with the air and surrounding conductors, then I venture to anticipate that the middle spark would be more retarded than before.

And if those two plates were the inner and outer coatings of a large jar or Leyden battery, then the retardation of the spark would be much greater.' This was only a prediction, for the experiment was not made.[2] Sixteen years subsequently, however, the proper conditions came into play, and Faraday was able to show that the observations of Werner Siemens, and Latimer Clark, on subterraneous and submarine wires were illustrations, on a grand scale, of the principle which he had enunciated in 1838.