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These atoms might, perhaps, now and then, here and there, at great distances and long intervals, produce by a chance contact some curious collocation or compound; but never could they produce order or organisation on an extensive scale, or of a durable character, unless ordered, arranged, and adjusted in ways of which intelligence alone can be the ultimate explanation.
We learn that in Nature there is nothing still and inert, but that everything is in incessant motion. There is no such thing as solid matter. The man of Science resolved matter into atoms, and now these atoms themselves are found to be as miniature universes. Round a central sun, termed a Proton, whirl a number of electrons in rhythmic motion and incessant swing.
His great bony fist crashed down upon the board and swept a precious Venetian beaker to the ground, where it burst into a thousand atoms, spreading red wine like a bloodstain upon the floor. "Said I not that this rascal Cardinal would make a clear field for himself? Said I not so?" He laughed shrill and fiercely. "He would send your husband packing as he has sent his other rivals.
The most extravagant and reckless crimes looked comparatively easy just then, and very tempting. He thought of getting into Logotheti's cellar with enough dynamite to blow the house, its owner and himself to atoms, not to speak of half the Boulevard Péreire.
Those which are crowded together at that end will hit on the drum of your ear and drive the membrane which covers it inwards; then instantly the wave will change, these atoms will bound back, and the membrane will recover itself again, but only to receive a second blow as the atoms are driven forwards again, and so the membrane will be driven in and out till the air has settled down.
As all the other boys had got away the sipahis turned their attention to him, but as they aimed blows at him with the sticks, he caught the blows on his arms and the sticks shivered to atoms without harming him; so then they went to kick him but a great cibei snake came rustling up behind them; so they saw it was no use to contend with him and desisted: whereupon he drove all the village cattle home in triumph.
There was a ringing in their ears and a roaring in their heads, and the very last atoms of oxygen in their lungs were almost gone. Death was drawing very near, and the bright, sunshiny world where they had been so happy a moment before, the world to which they had thought they could return so quickly and easily, seemed a thousand miles away.
The ether is quite harmonic without relations. So long as the atoms of matter were regarded as hard round particles, they were assumed to be inert and only active when acted upon by what were called forces, which were held to be entities of some sort, independent of matter. These could pull or push it here or there, but the matter was itself incapable of independent activity.
The same remarks are true of chemists. The founders of the atomic theory certainly saw atoms, and pictured them in the mind's eye, and their arrangement in compound bodies. The complexity of the imagination increases still more in the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist; it approaches more and more, with its increasing details, to the level of perception.
"The great concern I have now, however, is to know whether this shaft has any issue. It may end in a granite roof in which case we shall be suffocated by compressed air, or dashed to atoms against the top. I fancy, already, that the air is beginning to be close and condensed. I have a difficulty in breathing."
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