Up to the middle of the 19th century, indeed up to about 1870, electrical science was, it may be said, a sealed book to the majority of electrical workers. Prior to this time a number of handbooks had been published on electricity and magnetism, notably Auguste de La Rive 's exhaustive ' Treatise on Electricity,' in 1851 (French) and 1853 (English); August Beer 's Einleitung in die Elektrostatik, die Lehre vom Magnetismus und die Elektrodynamik, Wiedemann 's ' Galvanismus,' and Reiss' ' Reibungsal-elektricitat.' But these works consisted in the main in details of experiments with electricity and magnetism, and but little with the laws and facts of those phenomena. Henry d'Abria published the results of some researches into the laws of induced currents, but owing to their complexity of the investigation it was not productive of very notable results. Around the mid-19th century, Fleeming Jenkin 's work on electricity and magnetism and Clerk Maxwell's ' Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism ' were published.