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In applying this demonstration to the general theory of light, he made the striking suggestion that "the luminiferous ether pervades the substance of all material bodies with little or no resistance, as freely, perhaps, as the wind passes through a grove of trees."

Lenard's experiments certainly favour the hypothesis of their being waves in the luminiferous ether. Professor Rontgen, of Wirzburg, profiting by Lenard's results, accidentally discovered that the rays coming from a Crookes tube, through the glass itself, could photograph the bones in the living hand, coins inside a purse, and other objects covered up or hid in the dark.

Dr. Hem believes that in the visible world there are void places vacua, and something more holes, as it were, through which animate and inanimate objects may fall into the invisible world and be seen and heard no more. The theory is something like this: Space is pervaded by luminiferous ether, which is a material thing as much a substance as air or water, though almost infinitely more attenuated.

We should be inclined to express the same law by saying, for example, that a sound is audible, when it consists of vibrations within the compass of the auditory nerve; that an object is visible, when either directly or by reflection, it sends forth luminiferous vibrations within the compass of the retina and the optic nerve.

And it was made before general acceptance of the division of the ether into soniferous, luminiferous and tangiferous. "'Which in whirls constitutes matter. Professor Lodge believed that 'some etheric molecules revolved so rapidly on their axis that they could not be penetrated. Watch the soap-bubbles that I am blowing. Each and every one is revolving as the earth revolves, from west to east.

In a beam of ordinary light the particles of the luminiferous ether vibrate in all directions perpendicular to the line of progression; by the act of polarization, performed here by Faraday, all oscillations but those parallel to a certain plane are eliminated.

But it happens that ordinary fluids gases and liquids cannot transmit lateral vibrations; only rigid bodies are capable of such a vibration. So it became necessary to assume that the luminiferous ether is a body possessing elastic rigidity a familiar property of tangible solids, but one quite unknown among fluids. The idea of transverse vibrations carried with it another puzzle.

The luminiferous ether is a substance which fills all space, and surrounds the atoms and molecules of bodies. To this inter-stellar and inter-atomic medium definite mechanical properties are ascribed, and we deal with it in our reasonings and calculations as a body possessed of these properties.

Jung followed Swedenborg and the mystics generally in affirming a psychic body, but was a pioneer in associating it with the luminiferous ether in a range of speculation which in our time supplies an hypothetical scientific basis for the environment of the discarnate. The movement developed along these lines till 1875.

I thought to myself how the present system of the universe depends upon what we term the luminiferous ether; of the perfect elasticity and inexpansibility of that ether; of what its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate particle of it as with matter no atom is ever added to or removed from the universe.