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Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks no, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
And it has an atmosphere of ether which not only interpenetrates the atom as oxygen and hydrogen interpenetrate the drop of water, but furnishes it with an envelope as the oxygen and hydrogen furnish the drop of water with one. Each physical atom is the centre of an etheric molecule composed of many etheric atoms vibrating at a greater or lesser speed and interpenetrating the atom.
The molecule has nine parts, of which eight are hydrogen and one oxygen because that is the experimentally known proportion in which oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water. Every substance, however finely divided into molecules, if it is not a simple substance, must therefore have, inside the molecular structure, a further atomic structure.
But a consideration of this condition of stable equilibrium in the molecule at once suggests a new question: How can an aggregation of atoms, having all their affinities satisfied, take any further part in chemical reactions? Seemingly such a molecule, whatever its physical properties, must be chemically inert, incapable of any atomic readjustments.
These attack the great crude world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.
Through study of the viscosity of gases that is to say, of the degree of frictional opposition they show to an object moving through them or to another current of gas an idea was gained, with the aid of mathematics, of the rate of speed at which the particles of the gas are moving, and the number of collisions which each particle must experience in a given time, and of the length of the average free path traversed by the molecule between collisions, These measurements were confirmed by study of the rate of diffusion at which different gases mix together, and also by the rate of diffusion of heat through a gas, both these phenomena being chiefly due to the helter-skelter flight of the molecules.
I believe the earth has but the same relation to space that the individual molecule has to any solid, liquid, or gaseous matter we know; and that, just as molecules strive to fly apart on the application of heat, this earth will repel that projectile when electricity, which we are coming to look upon as another form of heat, is properly applied.
"Come here!" he cried; and when I had somewhat reluctantly obeyed what I considered the request of one whose internal sense had got a jerk from some mad molecule out of its orbit in the brain "Do you see anything?" "Yes," said I "a big black negative; but as for anything positive, you might as well look into a coal-pit and find what philosophers do in the wells of truth.
And since a molecule, as a general rule, contains two or more atoms, and may contain many of them, why not predicate dynamic force of the atoms, which lie one step nearer the elementary forces of nature? For the mightiest forces of nature lie in these elements, when forced into unnatural alliances, or chained up in durance vile.
Compression alone, then, will not avail to enable cohesion to win the battle. But the physicist has another resource. He may place the cylinder of gas in a cold medium, so that the heat vibrations sent into it will be less vigorous than those it sends out. That is a blow the molecule cannot withstand.