3 66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" their life has not an eternal principle as its center ; at their death, 

 all is at an end with them." According to Paracelsus, " All the 

 elements have a soul and are living. . . . They are not inferior 

 to man, but they differ from him in not having an immortal soul. 

 They are the powers of Nature that is, it is they that do what we 

 usually attribute to Nature. We may call them beings, but they 

 are not of the race of Adam." A similar doctrine is developed in 

 Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. The same method of conceiv- 

 ing of the production of physical phenomena has had defenders in 

 the world of positive science, as in the doctrine of monads of 

 Leibnitz; in the anatomical elements of Claude Bernard, who 

 speaks of our bodies as being composed of millions, milliards of 

 minute beings or living individuals of different species, of which 

 those of the same species unite to constitute our tissues, while the 

 tissues join to constitute our organs, and all react upon one another 

 with a harmonious concurrence for a common end ;* and in Sir 

 John Herschel, who wrote in the Fortnightly Review, in 1865, that 

 all that has been attributed to atoms, their loves and hates, their 

 attractions and repulsions, according to the primitive laws of 

 their being, becomes intelligible only when we admit the presence 

 of a mental quality in them. Modern scientific theories tend to 

 assume the unity of matter, of a protyle, which forms all substances 

 by different degrees of condensation. Some go still further, and 

 assume that there is no matter in the ordinary sense of the word, 

 but only force and energy. F. Hartman argues that we can change 

 force into matter, and that is what takes place every instant in the 

 human body, as well as in the vegetable and animal world, and 

 we can change matter into force under like conditions. This 

 etheric force, the base of all the others, is what Lord Lytton de- 

 scribes in his romance, The Future Race, as "vril." So these 

 dreams are repeated to receive, perhaps, possible verifications 

 in future discoveries ; and thus old follies may, as Beaumarchais 

 says, in the Marriage of Figaro, become wisdom, "and the fictions 

 of the ancients be transformed into pretty little truths." Trans- 

 lated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scien- 

 tifique. 



According to calculations by M. L. Niesten, all the asteroids known (now 

 more than 300), if combined into one, would form a body not quite 514 miles in 

 diameter, or less than one twentieth the diameter of the earth ; and it would 

 require 8,575 bodies like it to form a planet having the volume of the earth. The 

 largest of the asteroids, Vesta, is 230 miles in diameter, and the smallest, Agatha, 

 four miles and a half. As all of these bodies having considerable size have most 

 probably been discovered, the estimate of the mass of the whole is not likely to 

 be materially affected by the detection of new ones. 



* Revue des Deux Mondes, September 1, 1864. 



