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History has not been kind to the Abbe Nollet. Greatly esteemed in his lifetime as the master of French experimental physics, and especially of the then new science of electricity, he is remembered today--when he is remembered at all--simply as a remarkably successful vulgarizer of science. Nollet, we recall, was the man who carried electrical demonstrating to the very pinnacle of French society, the court of Louis XV himself, and amused the King by causing a long line of monks to leap as one into the air when a battery of Leyden jars was discharged through them. But we tend to dismiss with, at best, a shrug and a knowing smile, his more serious efforts at constructing a theory of electricity adequate to account for the then known phenomena. His theory was from the outset, such gestures imply, both impossibly complex and hopelessly wrong, and it was a fortunate chance indeed that saw it overwhelmed within a few years of its first, being made public by Benjamin Franklin's vastly better alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]