ATOMIC WORLDS AND THEIR MOTIONS. 183 



Abel Hovelacque is not in favor of, but wbich MM. Vogt and 

 Huxley, who are little suspected of orthodoxy, admit — a gulf 

 which, is growing wider every day under our very eyes ; in which 

 we are still permitted to perceive those lost paths, going from 

 one side to the other, of which Mr. Huxley speaks in the preface 

 to the French translation of his " Man's Place in Nature " ; but 

 which will soon become insuperable by the disappearance, on the 

 one side, of the last existing anthropoids, and, on the other side, 

 of the last inferior human races ; when man will be left isolated 

 and majestic, proudly proclaiming himself the king of creation. 



We need not blush, then, for our ancestors : we were monkeys, 

 as before them we were reptiles, fishes, yes, even worms or crus- 

 taceans. But that was a long time ago, and we have grown up. 

 Evolution, let us say it, has lavished its favors upon us, and has 

 given us all the advantages in the struggle for existence. Our 

 rivals of yesterday are at our mercy ; we leave those which dis- 

 please us to perish, we create new species when we want them. 

 On our planet we reign, fashioning things at our will, piercing 

 isthmuses, going down into seas, ransacking the air, suppressing 

 distances, and snatching from the earth its secrets of ages. Our 

 aspirations, our thought, our action, have no bounds. Every- 

 thing pivots around us. What more can we desire ? To be god ? 

 That may come. Evolution has not had its last word. The an- 

 thropopithecus has been ; the anthropotheomorphus may be. M. 

 Hovelacque has tried to reconstitute the one ; why may we not 

 some day try to constitute the other, the man of the future ? 



ATOMIC WORLDS AND THEIR MOTIONS. 



By Dr. HEINRICH HENSOLDT. 



THIS formidable title will doubtless lead many of my readers 

 to apprehend that I am now going to inflict upon them one 

 of those abstruse and profound disquisitions on molecular physics 

 which are very learned and very incomprehensible. But I do not 

 propose to do anything of the kind. I have no desire to go into 

 mathematics, or to weary them with a more or less tedious reca- 

 pitulation of the gradual development, from crude beginnings, of 

 our present science of molecular dynamics, by going back to the 

 earliest conceptions of atoms by the Greek philosophers, or even 

 to the time of Dalton and Bernouilli. 



I merely desire to explain, in as popular a language as the sub- 

 ject permits, in how far the researches of men like Helmholtz and 

 Sir William Thomson have modified our ideas of the ultimate 

 composition of matter. There will be nothing offered that is 



