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The choice of grave works was not large, and she found it difficult to command her thoughts even for the perusal of titles; however, she ultimately discovered a book that promised anything but frivolity, Helmholtz's 'Lectures on Scientific Subjects, and at this she clutched. Two loudly-dressed women were at the same time searching the shelves.
The sky seemed brass, the atmosphere a blast from Tophet; and the sun, still standing at some distance above the horizon, glared mercilessly down over the panting parched: earth, as if a recent and unusually copious shower of "meteoric cosmical matter" had fallen into the solar furnace, and prompted it by increased incandescence to hotly deny the truth of Helmholtz's assertion: "The inexorable laws of mechanics show that the store of heat in the sun must be finally exhausted."
The tendency to bridge the gulf that hitherto had separated the physical from the psychical world was further evidenced in the following decade by Helmholtz's remarkable but highly technical study of the sensations of sound and of color in connection with their physical causes, in the course of which he revived the doctrine of color vision which that other great physiologist and physicist, Thomas Young, had advanced half a century before.
Ellis was at that time president of the London Philological Society, and had translated Helmholtz's The Sensation of Tone into English.
Each register was ascribed to a distinct mode of operation of the vocal cords, and for several years the terms "chest voice" and "head voice" were held to be scientifically unsound. But with the publication of Helmholtz's Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen in 1863, the sensations of vibration again received attention.
A theory, which Sir W. Thomson has founded on Helmholtz's splendid hydrodynamical theorems, seeks for the properties of molecules in the ring vortices of a uniform, frictionless, incompressible fluid. Such whirling rings may be seen when an experienced smoker sends out a dexterous puff of smoke into the still air, but a more evanescent phenomenon it is difficult to conceive.
In point of fact, Helmholtz's experiments narrowed the issue to this: that which excites fermentation and putrefaction, and at the same time gives rise to living forms in a fermentable or putrescible fluid, is not a gas and is not a diffusible fluid; therefore it is either a colloid, or it is matter divided into very minute solid particles.
But the primitive event, assumed for the purpose of dispensing them from the inconvenience of "hurrying up their phenomena," is not one that a sane judgment can readily admit to have ever, in point of actual fact, happened. There remains, then, as the only intelligible rationale of solar sustentation, Helmholtz's shrinkage theory.
Helmholtz's explanation of this illusion is that when we suppose that we are fixing our eye on the carpet we are really continuing to move it over the surface by reason of the organic tendency, already spoken of, to go on doing anything that has been done.
But these extravagantly long periods required by the theory, science cannot grant, for the following reasons: According to the nebular hypothesis, and Helmholtz's contraction theory, accounting for the regular supply of heat from the sun, the sun itself is not likely more than 20,000,000 years old, and, of course, the earth is much younger.
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