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Updated: June 4, 2025
"In our opinion, the solar radiation is sustained by the continual influx of souls into the sun." This, as the reader will perceive, is the well-known theory of Mayer, that the solar heat is due to a perennial bombardment of the sun by meteors, save that, in place of gross materialistic meteors, M. Figuier puts ethereal souls.
The speculations of Helmholtz "have the disadvantage of resting on the idea of the sun's nebulosity, an hypothesis which would need to be more closely examined before serving as a basis for so important a deduction." Accordingly, M. Figuier propounds an explanation which possesses the signal advantage that there is nothing hypothetical in it.
Nevertheless, the sort of scientific reputation which these discreditable performances have gained for M. Figuier among an uncritical public is such as to justify us in devoting a few paragraphs to a book which, on its own merits, is unworthy of any notice whatever.
How have those deserved the partiality of fortune, who live in happy lands, while many of their brethren suffer and weep in other parts of the world?" Figuier continues: "Some men are endowed with all benefits of mind; others, on the contrary, are devoid of intelligence, penetration and memory. They stumble at every step in their rough life-paths.
And this I call a triumph of genius, making the seemingly destructive wrath of the elements to serve and save us. M. Figuier tells us with just how many hundred thousand horse-power the sun, by the caloric of its beams, operates upon the surface of the earth.
We do not remember these past existences, it is true; but when we become ether-folk, we shall be able to look back in recollection over the whole series. Amid these sublime inquiries, M. Figuier is sometimes notably oblivious of humbler truths, as might indeed be expected.
The best-known modern treatise on the divining-rod is that of M. Chevreul, 'La Baguette Divinatoire' . We have also 'L'Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes, by M. Figuier . In 1781 Thouvenel published his 600 experiments with Bleton and others; and Hegel refers to Amoretti's collection of hundreds of cases.
In a recent work in which the crudest fancies of primeval savagery are thinly disguised in a jargon learned from the superficial reading of modern books of science, M. Figuier maintains that human souls are for the most part the surviving souls of deceased animals; in general, the souls of precocious musical children like Mozart come from nightingales, while the souls of great architects have passed into them from beavers, etc., etc.
One of the most ingenious and probable of these hypotheses is that of Helmholtz, according to which the solar radiance is due to the arrested motion of the sun's constituent particles toward their common centre of gravity. But this is too fanciful to satisfy M. Figuier.
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