Edward Huntington Williams

“ The modern chemist makes no claim for his elements except that they have thus far resisted all human efforts to dissociate them; it would be nothing strange if some of them, when subjected to the crucible of the sun, which is seen to vaporize iron, nickel, silicon, should fail to withstand the test. But again, chemistry has by no means exhausted the resources of the earth's supply of raw material, and the substance which sends its message from a star may exist undiscovered in the dust we tread or in the air we breathe. ”

“ Arcturus, the brightest measured star, shines like two hundred suns; and even this giant orb is dim beside those other stars which are so distant that their parallax cannot be measured, yet which greet our eyes at first magnitude. As to actual bulk, of which apparent lustre furnishes no adequate test, some stars are smaller than the sun, while others exceed him hundreds or perhaps thousands of times. Yet one and all, so distant are they, remain mere disklike points of light before the utmost powers of the modern telescope. ”

“ If it be considered as now established that in many cases no other effect of motion can be traced except heat, and that no other cause than motion can be found for the heat that is produced, we prefer the assumption that heat proceeds from motion to the assumption of a cause without effect and of an effect without a cause. Just as the chemist, instead of allowing oxygen and hydrogen to disappear without further investigation, and water to be produced in some inexplicable manner, establishes a connection between oxygen and hydrogen on the one hand, and water on the other. ”

“ In the year 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake for teaching that our earth is not the centre of the universe. In 1700, Newton was pronounced "impious and heretical" by a large school of philosophers for declaring that the force which holds the planets in their orbits is universal gravitation. In 1800, Laplace and Herschel are honored for teaching that gravitation built up the system which it still controls; that our universe is but a minor nebula, our sun but a minor star, our earth a mere atom of matter, our race only one of myriad races peopling an infinity of worlds. ”

“ Led by this reflection to consider the body as a machine dependent on outside forces for its capacity to act, he passed on into a novel realm of thought, which brought him at last to independent discovery of the mechanical theory of heat, and to the first full and comprehensive appreciation of the great law of conservation. Blood-letting, the modern physician holds, was a practice of very doubtful benefit, as a rule, to the subject; but once, at least, it led to marvellous results. No straw is go small that it may not point the receptive mind of genius to new and wonderful truths. ”

“ Meantime, however, the ether, be it substance or be it only dream-stuff, is serving an admirable purpose in furnishing a fulcrum for modern physics. Not alone to the student of energy has it proved invaluable, but to the student of matter itself as well. Out of its hypothetical mistiness has been reared the most tenable theory of the constitution of ponderable matter which has yet been suggested—or, at any rate, the one that will stand as the definitive nineteenth-century guess at this "riddle of the ages." ”

“ Whoever thinks of the earth as a cooling globe can hardly doubt that its crust, when thinner, may have heaved under strain of the moon's tidal pull—whether or not that body was nearer—into great billows, daily rising and falling, like waves of the present seas vastly magnified. ”

“ James Hutton, of Edinburgh, physician, farmer, and manufacturing chemist—patient, enthusiastic, level-headed devotee of science. Inspired by his love of chemistry to study the character of rocks and soils, Hutton had not gone far before the earth stood revealed to him in a new light. He saw, what generations of predecessors had blindly refused to see, that the face of nature everywhere, instead of being rigid and immutable, is perennially plastic, and year by year is undergoing metamorphic changes. ”

“ For having in the natural history of the earth seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. ”

“ And the controversy waged over the age of the earth had not been more bitter, that over catastrophism not more acrimonious, than that which now raged over the question of the transmutation of species. The question had implications far beyond the bounds of paleontology, of course. The main evidence yet presented had been drawn from quite other fields, but by common consent the record in the rocks might furnish a crucial test of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis. "He who rejects this view of the imperfections of the geological record," said Darwin, "will rightly reject the whole theory." ”

“ The great generalization which Faraday so narrowly missed is the truth which since then has become familiar as the doctrine of the conservation of energy—the law that in transforming energy from one condition to another we can never secure more than an equivalent quantity; that, in short, "to create or annihilate energy is as impossible as to create or annihilate matter; and that all the phenomena of the material universe consist in transformations of energy alone." Some philosophers think this the greatest generalization ever conceived by the mind of man. ”

“ A generation trained, as ours has been, in the doctrines of the conservation and dissipation of energy as the very alphabet of physical science can but ill appreciate the mental attitude of a generation which for the most part had not even thought it problematical whether the sun could continue to give out heat and light forever. But those advance thinkers who had grasped the import of the doctrine of conservation could at once appreciate the force of Thomson's doctrine of dissipation, and realize the complementary character of the two conceptions. ”

“ Hence the ease with which the comet may be dismembered and its particles strung out into streaming swarms.
So thickly is the space we traverse strewn with this cometary dust that the earth sweeps up, according to Professor Newcomb's estimate, a million tons of it each day. Each individual particle, perhaps no larger than a millet seed, becomes a shooting-star, or meteor, as it burns to vapor in the earth's upper atmosphere. And if one tiny planet sweeps up such masses of this cosmic matter, the amount of it in the entire stretch of our system must be beyond all estimate. ”

“ For the nineteenth-century physicist, in displacing the "imponderable fluids" of many kinds—one each for light, heat, electricity, magnetism—has been obliged to substitute for them one all-pervading fluid, whose various quivers, waves, ripples, whirls or strains produce the manifestations which in popular parlance are termed forms of force. This all-pervading fluid the physicist terms the ether, and he thinks of it as having no weight. ”

“ The physicist could think of but one way: they must assume that the ether is incompressible. It must fill all space—at any rate, all space with which human knowledge deals—perfectly full.
These properties of the ether, incompressibility and elastic rigidity, are quite conceivable by themselves; but difficulties of thought appear when we reflect upon another quality which the ether clearly must possess—namely, frictionlessness. By hypothesis this rigid, incompressible body pervades all space, imbedding every particle of tangible matter ”

“ Thus blindly groped the majority of eighteenth-century philosophers in their attempts to study what we now term geology. Deluded by the old deductive methods, they founded not a science, but the ghost of a science, as immaterial and as unlike anything in nature as any other phantom that could be conjured from the depths of the speculative imagination. ”

“ But, on the other hand, Hutton and Playfair, and in particular Lyell, drew inferences from this principle which the modern physicist can by no means admit. To them it implied that the changes on the surface of the earth have always been the same in degree as well as in kind, and must so continue while present forces hold their sway. In other words, they thought of the world as a great perpetual-motion machine. But the modern physicist, given truer mechanical insight by the doctrines of the conservation and the dissipation of energy, will have none of that. ”

“ Yet we must not forget that the shield has a reverse side. For was not the greatest of observing astronomers, Herschel, past thirty-five before he ever saw a telescope, and past fifty before he discovered the heat rays of the spectrum? And had not Faraday reached middle life before he turned his attention especially to electricity? Clearly, then, to make this phrase complete, Bacon should have added that "the man who is old in years may be young in imagination." ”

“ A phenomenon not only very difficult to explain under this hypothesis, but one which is even contrary to it, is the slight eccentricity of the planetary orbits. We know, by the theory of central forces, that if a body moves in a closed orbit around the sun and touches it, it also always comes back to that point at every revolution; whence it follows that if the planets were originally detached from the sun, they would touch it at each return towards it, and their orbits, far from being circular, would be very eccentric. ”

“ Then, just as surely, the slow action of the elements will continue to wear away the land surfaces, particle by particle, and transport them to the ocean, as it does to-day, until, compensation no longer being afforded by the upheaval of the continents, the last foot of dry land will sink for the last time beneath the water, the last mountain-peak melting away, and our globe, lapsing like any other organism into its second childhood, will be on the surface—as presumably it was before the first continent rose—one vast "waste of waters." ”

“ COUNT RUMFORD AND THE VIBRATORY THEORY OF HEAT
But just at the close of the century the confidence in the status of the imponderables was rudely shaken in the minds of philosophers by the revival of the old idea of Fra Paolo and Bacon and Boyle, that heat, at any rate, is not a material fluid, but merely a mode of motion or vibration among the particles of "ponderable" matter. The new champion of the old doctrine as to the nature of heat was a very distinguished philosopher and diplomatist of the time, who, it may be worth recalling, was an American. ”

“ But even though imagination pause far short of this direful culmination, it still is clear that modern calculations, based on inexorable tidal friction, suffice to revolutionize the views formerly current as to the stability of the planetary system. The eighteenth-century mathematician looked upon this system as a vast celestial machine which had been in existence about six thousand years, and which was destined to run on forever. ”

“ He found the fossil shells—the fossils of invertebrates, as he himself had christened them—in deeper strata than Cuvier's vertebrates; and he believed that there had been long ages when no higher forms than these were in existence, and that in successive ages fishes, and then reptiles, had been the highest of animate creatures, before mammals, including man, appeared. Looking beyond the pale of his bare facts, as genius sometimes will, he had insisted that these progressive populations had developed one from another, under influence of changed surroundings, in unbroken series. ”

“ We have now considered the globe of this earth as a machine, constructed upon chemical as well as mechanical principles, by which its different parts are all adapted, in form, in quality, and quantity, to a certain end—an end attained with certainty of success, and an end from which we may perceive wisdom in contemplating the means employed. ”

“ We here on the earth's surface are protected from exposure to this cold, which would deprive every organic thing of life almost instantaneously, solely by the thin blanket of atmosphere with which the globe is coated. It would seem as if this atmosphere, exposed to such a temperature at its surface, must there be incessantly liquefied, and thus fall back like rain to be dissolved into gas again while it still is many miles above the earth's surface. This may be the reason why its scurrying molecules have not long ago wandered off into space and left the world without protection. ”

“ Yet it may not be altogether amiss to reflect that the physicist of to-day is no more certain of his ether than was his predecessor of the eighteenth century of the existence of certain alleged substances which he called phlogiston, caloric, corpuscles of light, and magnetic and electric fluids. It would be but the repetition of history should it chance that before the close of another century the ether should have taken its place along with these discarded creations of the scientific imagination of earlier generations. The philosopher of to-day feels very sure that an ether exists ”

“ The championship of Arago insured the undulatory theory a hearing before the French Institute, but by no means sufficed to bring about its general acceptance. On the contrary, a bitter feud ensued, in which Arago was opposed by the "Jupiter Olympus of the Academy," Laplace, by the only less famous Poisson, and by the younger but hardly less able Biot. So bitterly raged the feud that a life-long friendship between Arago and Biot was ruptured forever. ”