coin is to-day called a molecule, but only in a state of celibacy is it also called an atom.

All that is plain sailing, when it is explained. The difficulty is with the logical atom which is, as one of my authorities very sagely observes, "by definition, indivisible." Accordingly, as soon as either of the other atoms does divide, the definition is re-defined to meet the altered circumstances. As thus.

Finding that one pint of a gas always unites with one or more full pints of another gas, and never with any odd fraction of a pint, the chemists have concluded that every pint of gas contains the same number of crumbs. But now when the two pints of hydrogen unite with the one pint of oxygen, they do not make three pints of steam, but only two pints. Therefore the chemists choose to say that the number of steam crumbs is the same with that of the original hydrogen crumbs, and double that of the original oxygen crumbs. What, then, has happened? Each of the oxygen crumbs has split in two, one half joining each hydrogen crumb. But the atom is "by definition, indivisible. How then can it split? The answer is that the oxygen crumb must be a double crumb.

It is not an atom, but Instead of being a penny

a little heap of two atoms. it is two halfpennies stuck together like the Siamese Twins. And each halfpenny is a logical atom.— One is tempted to add Euclid's Q. E. D.

By similar reasoning the atoms of hydrogen and chlorine have also been revealed as twins; and should occasion arise for it no doubt the twins will become triplets, and the halfpennies farthings. In this way the

integrity of the logical atom should always be maintained.

Meanwhile I will commend to the attention of all atomists the Chinese definition of a Point.

is a thing which has not got division."

"A point

Such is the story of the Atom; and we cannot be surprised if the historian of Creation has been caught tripping in the network of arithmetic, logic and imagination, which I have laboured to unweave, in the belief that what can be said in shorthand can be said in longhand, if we take the pains.

III

The Story of Creation now leaves the crumbs to bring upon the scene a new item inexcusably omitted from the inventory of the universe. This is an "elastic medium" called Ether, something as much finer than air as the crumbs are finer than bricks. So that, ridding my mind of the words "very small". which can only mean small beside a man-I learn that the All-Thing is a sort of jelly with bricks jostling each other inside it under the stress of that Power which formed the second item in the inventory. The Ether, it seems, is a "necessary assumption;' it is indeed a sort of dustbin into which Science throws her breakages. I understand, however, from

other sources of information, that the dustbin is becoming choked, and that Science has now called for another, and far finer medium, to be called Ethereon, which will trickle through the Ether as that trickles through the air, and as water trickles through a sponge. Nor shall I be surprised to hear later on that even in the Ethereon Science has not got quite to the bottom of Everything, and that finer and finer mediums, Etheroids and Ethereonoids and Etherolites, will go on trickling through each other to endlessness. The world is held up by an elephant, and the elephant is held up by a tortoise, and the tortoise is held up by- — what?

IV

In the meanwhile the story of Matter has not ended with the crumb.

The crumb has been guessed by no mean guesser to be made of Ether, to be a sort of ring made by a whirlpool in the Ether, which has somehow got its tail into its mouth like a fried whiting. guess no longer holds the field.

That

According to the last report I have received from the headquarters of science-a report which has caused much of my language in the first draft of this Letter to take an air of plagiarism—the crumb is made up of electricity, which is to say, amberstrength. This strength shows two sides, or ways, called yea and nay, and both join to shape the crumb. The crumb is a relatively big ball of yea strength inside which a swarm of lesser balls of nay

strength are going round and round, the little balls having between them as much of nay as the bigger ball has of yea. I give the learned words:

"The hydrogen atom consists of a big sphere of uniformly distributed positive electrification, and a thousand negative corpuscles travelling, each in its own orbit, within the positive sphere. The total of positive electrification is equal to the sum of the negatives in the thousand corpuscles.

Such is the image of Matter formed in the mind of a great scientist, too true a scientist to offer it as anything but a guess. It may not be the right guess. It is not there, perhaps, that pretty Chinese toy, those wheels within a wheel, that dance of moons within the belly of their sun. The pick of Science has gone too deep, and struck the well of poetry. But as it stands it is the last and best guess that science has made in our time about the ultimate nature of Matter.

And what else is it but a network-a thousand knots tied up in one knot? The pick of the physicist has chimed against the pick of the psychologist, as in the middle of a tunnel, and wrought a thoroughfare for light. And that is what I call a Rhyme.

Of what is the network made? Let us hear the last word of Materialism on itself." Matter is electric charge, or electric charge is Matter, whichever way we like to put it.'

The ultimate nature of Matter is Power. The inventory of the universe was too long by half.

NINTH HEAD.

THE DEMON IN THE STONE.

Force and Energy.—1. The Quarrel of the Twins.

I find it harder to write about strength than about shapes, for the same reason that I find it harder to explain the word idealist than the word dynamite.

The author of the Story of Creation, on the other hand, seems to have approached his second topic with peculiar confidence, and as one who had made. it his own; for in his preface he has undertaken to give "rigid and definite meanings" to the words Force and Energy; a service so great that he himself perhaps does not see how great it is.

However, his teaching on this head is not wholly his own. He is less an inventor than a legislator, bringing order into the realm of scientific thought.

I

Unlike that other lawgiver, whose Story of Creation still finds readers, the present writer begins his