If Force had unresisted play, all the atoms in the universe would gravitate to a common centre, and ultimately form a perfect sphere in which no life would exist, and in which no work would be done. If Energy had unresisted play, the atoms in the universe would be driven asunder and remain for ever separated, with the like result of changeless powerlessness. But with these two powers in conflict, like the Ahriman and Ormuzd of the old Persian religion, the universe is the theatre of ceaseless redistributions of its contents, whether in the sweep of the stars and their attendant systems through space, or in the pendulum-like vibrations of the invisible particles of every body, or in the throbs of the ethereal medium. So rapid are the motions, the rebounds between each molecule in hydrogen gas numbering seventeen thousand millions per second, that even if the molecules were within microscopic range we could not see them; and yet these collisions are few compared with the oscillations of light waves, which number hundreds of millions of millions in the same time.

Such action shows that just as there are spaces or distances between the stars measureless in their vastness, so there are pores or spaces between the molecules of bodies, and between the atoms which compose the molecules, measureless in their minuteness. And if added proofs of these intermolecular and interatomic spaces were needed, we find them in the contraction and expansion of bodies through the quickened or retarded vibrations due to the separating energy manifest as heat; in the compressibility, although slight, of liquids; in the actual solidification of the most refractory gases under extreme cold and pressure, oxygen resembling snow in appearance, and hydrogen falling on the floor with the rattling noise of hail. But more than this. These pores

between invisible particles, these spaces between star and star, spaces so vast that the diameter of the earth's orbit, measuring one hundred and eighty-eight millions of miles, seen from the nearest star, is but a pin's point, are not vacant. Speaking of the force of gravitation, Newton said that to conceive of one body acting upon another through a vacuum is so great an absurdity, that no man who had 'in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking' could ever fall into it.

And the like applies to the transmission of light, heat, and other forms of energy between bodies far and near. Therefore for the explanation of these varied and yet related phenomena it is a necessary assumption that the minutest intervals between atoms, as well as the awful spaces of the universe, are filled with a highly rarefied, elastic medium called Ether, which, ever tremulous with unentangled vibrations, is the vehicle of Energy alike from the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

That matter should be unseen and unfelt is no new conception to us. Its existence in an ultra-gaseous state as proven by the action of molecules in tubes where as high a vacuum as seems possible is obtained; its invisibility in air-the vehicle of sound; in steam, and in substances vaporised by the voltaic arc-its extreme rarefaction in such bodies as comets, the stuff of whose tails, spreading across millions of miles, could be compressed into a small vessel; prepare us to conceive unseen realities. Thus, when the sensory organs are powerless to report the facts, Science, excluding no faculty from wholesome exercise, bids Imagination use her larger insight to make clear the significance of the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard.

The value of the foregoing abstract of the relations between Matter and Power will be proved or disproved

in the degree in which it squares with the phenomena to be hereafter described and explained. Meanwhile the subjoined tabular summary may set the subject in a clearer light.

Each kind of Kinetic Energy has separative, combining, and continuous or neutral motion. Example of Separative-a stone thrown upwards; example of Combining-a stone falling; example of Neutral-a top spinning in the same place.

"This concept of Electrical Units, which may be the equivalent of Polarity of the atom, is here added merely as a convenient mode of envisaging a certain order of phenomena.

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CHAPTER II.

DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER IN SPACE.

MATTER is both visible and invisible, ponderable and imponderable. In its ponderable form it is distributed throughout space in bodies of varying densities; in its imponderable form as ether it fills the intervals between the particles composing those bodies, as also the vast intervals between the bodies themselves. The most important of these-as the sand by the sea-shore, innumerable are the 'fixed' stars, so called from having no apparent motion of their own, although in reality travelling at enormous velocities. Each of these, unless it be an extinct, burnt-out sun, shines by its own light, and is probably, like the sun, which is itself a star, the centre of a system of planets with their satellites or moons and other bodies. 'One star differeth from another star in glory.' Not, speaking broadly, in the stuff of which all are made, for the light thrown by the spectroscope on the chemistry of the heavenly bodies has revealed their general identity of structure. matter how distant the star, so long as the light emitted is strong enough; broken on prisms, it reveals through its spectrum not only what elements are present in the glowing vapour, but even the direction of the star's notion, i.e. whether it is receding from or approaching

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our system. The annual parallax (or the apparent change of position as seen from opposite points of the earth's orbit) of the nearest fixed star, Alpha Centauri, is nearly one second of arc, giving a distance of twenty millions of millions of miles. So vast is the interval, that our solar system would appear as only a point in space when viewed from this star, the light from which, travelling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second of time, takes nearly three years and a half to reach us, so that we see the star as it then shone.

The differences between the stars are in their sizes, their brilliancy or magnitude, and their colours, this last giving some clue to their stage of development. For there are stars young, middle-aged, old and decrepit; and there are stars cold and dead, radiating no energy, and whose existence can be known only by their influence exerted through the force of gravitation upon the proper motion of other bodies, as, e.g., of Sirius by its unseen companion.

Astronomers have not yet arrived at any certain conclusions regarding the general distribution of matter in space. But the combinations, as seen from our system, are as varied as they are complex. Besides double and multiple stars-their apparent nearness to one another often being due to their lying in nearly the same straight line from our system-there are the constellations, many of the names of which are relics of that animistic stage in man's belief when everything was personified. There are also star-clusters, light, cloudylooking patches, made up of suns which, from our point of view, lie densely packed together in numberless galaxies.

Besides the fixed stars and their systems, straggling