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"Somewhat like a man going in for treatment of a broken arm; in any decent hospital they'll also check for any other medical problems, and he'll come out healthier than if he had never had the broken arm. "Wade seems to have had a mind that made friends with molecules, and talked their language. After Ridgely shows him how to make friends with people I think he'll be quite a man on our team!"
Even granting that molecular changes do take place during the development of the vital units in their necessary plasmic environment; it by no means follows that these changes are not dependent on the vital principle as it acts, rather than on the molecules as they act, The higher force should always subordinate the lower in all metamorphic, as well as other processes, of nature.
It is doubtful if anything on this sphere except the atoms and molecules of matter have varied as little as the trade winds in the centre of the wide ocean.
Joule, Clausius, and Maxwell, and no doubt Daniel Bernoulli himself, and I believe every one who has hitherto written or done anything very explicit in the kinetic theory of gases, has taken the mutual action of molecules in collision as repulsive. May it not after all be attractive?
Is it, as some of the older naturalists supposed, diffused throughout the universe in molecules, which are indestructible and unchangeable in themselves; but, in endless transmigration, unite in innumerable permutations, into the diversified forms of life we know? Or, is the matter of life composed of ordinary matter, differing from it only in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated?
The very existence of an ocean of ether enveloping the molecules of material bodies has been doubted or denied by many eminent physicists, though of course none have called in question the necessity for some interstellar medium for the transmission of thermal and luminous vibrations.
And when heated it is converted into vapour, but with a loss or "making latent" of heat, which, like its behaviour when solidifying, indicates that water is endowed with a very peculiar structure or mechanism in the putting together of its 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.
It has its inner world of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint. This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and automatic what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature's infinite book of secrecy"!
Sir J. J. Thomson has devised a method by which he has been able to photograph the atoms. The photographic plate upon which their flight is recorded suggests a shower of shooting stars. Oxygen is found to be made up of atoms of several different forms. The "free path" of molecules, both in liquids and in gases, is so minute as to be beyond the reach of the most powerful microscope.
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