lr,2 THANSACTIUNS OF TIIK ILLlNtUS 



of Other stars must flare abroad at random on all sides, away up in the infi- 

 nite voids throughout all space, where there is no known or thinkable 

 matter either to excite, attract, need, or reciprocate them, much as they 

 do here on earth, where there is always matter — solid, liquid, or gaseous 

 — to reciprocate and attract them ; and they even imagine auras and 

 ethers as a sort of ladders to help heat and light to climb away off from 

 the sun, in all directions towards infinite nothingness, for no conceivable 

 end or purpose under heaven. 



The utter waste of such a patent out-door furnace for warming and 

 lighting the universe, and the total destruction, on this theory, of the 

 great law that " action and reaction are equal," the basal law of all physi- 

 cal science, never for once seemed to occur to these theorists. Amid 

 this utter loss and waste of heat and light, coupled with the admitted 

 difficulty which the planets must find in trying to force their way along 

 their orbits, amid their fancied auras and ethers and contrivances to help 

 light and heat away to nothing and for nothing, that the planets should 

 begin to falter in their course, all worlds and all being begin to lack heat 

 and freeze up in their own tracks, or plunge into the sun in a last effort 

 to keep warm, and that the sun himself should at last freeze up, and all 

 being perish together, by no means scares our philosojjhers out of their 

 theory. They boldly and frankly admit it. 



You will here permit me, gentlemen, to say that I admire their 

 pluck far more than I do their philosophy or their fancy or their good 

 sense. 



Suppose we admit the existence of their auras and ethers as a means 

 of helping mere force of any kind to climb out into vacant space or from 

 planet to planet. Unless the particles of their ether absolutely touch, 

 and the ether itself is, therefore, considerably more solid than cast iron, 

 we shall still need other auras and ethers to help force to climb from 

 particle to particle or from atom to atom, just as much as we now need 

 them to help it along from planet to planet or from sun to sun. 



When we are ready to give up the false assumptions and theories 

 with which mere schoolmen and dogmatists have filled our books, both of 

 science and of faith, and brush away the fogs and the fancies with which 

 they have filled and darkened both the natural and the spiritual heavens, 

 we shall begin to see each of these alike in all that magnificent simplicity 

 as well as infinite variety in which God Himself has truly revealed them 

 unto us ; and Professor Tice, or any one else, may propose whatever new 

 facts he chooses, without fear of their being overturned by mere moon- 

 shine, and we shall begin to build up some rational science of meteor- 

 ology. 



So far as we now know, force acts in accordance with its own 

 methods or laws, wherever it can find opposite matter to act upon, 

 through spaces of utter void, however wide, not only with no media or 

 intervening means through which to act, but in spite of whatever media 

 should seek to arrest its natural and necessary mode of action. It may 

 be diverted, or its mere modes of action changed ; but it can never be 

 annihilated or (Iciaiiicd from moving matter in some form, and that, too, 



