APPENDIX A LVII 



When observers, then, are watching the projection of streams of 

 particles from the matter around us, they may be really watching the 

 wasting away of our world. This reminds me of an account I have 

 read of a sailor in an old and lealcv troop-ship on a long voyage who 

 used to go down to the hold, and watching the tiny jets of water spurt- 

 ing sin through the minute holes in the thin worn sides, try to estimate 

 how long the vessel would last. 



If this Trilogy of principles, Conservation, Transformation, Dissi- 

 pation" should be finally established for Matter, as they have been 

 established for Energy, the further question would arise whether, as the 

 energy we spea"k of is always associated with matter, the expressions for 

 them could not be united in one simple form. 



Tait referring to the Dissipation of Energy, proceeds further to 

 say " as it aloife is able to- lead us — ^to tlie necessary future of the universe 

 " i.e., if physical laws for ever remain unchanged, so it enables us dis- 

 '■' tinctly to say, that the present order of things has not been evolved 

 "tlirough infinite past time by the agency of laws now at work, but 

 ^' must have had a distinctive beginning, a state beyond which we are 

 "utterly unable to penetrate, a state ]n fact that must have been pro- 

 '' duced by other than the now visibly acting Causes." 



Cicero, Herschel, Cleric-Maxwell, on Atoms. 



This leads us to an aspect of the theorj' of atoms which can hardly 

 be passed, over. 



Cicero in his "De Natura Deorum," Bk. I, represents Cotta, the 

 Academic, speaking of the " absurdities in which Democritus, or before 

 him Leucippus, used to indulge, saying that thire are certain light cor- 

 puscles, some smooth, some round, some square, some crooked and bent 

 as bows, which by a fortuitous concourse, made heaven and earth, without 

 tlie influence of any natural power." In the second book Balbus, the 

 Stoic sa}S, that he who could believe in the action of this fortuitous 

 concourse, might believe as well that a number of metal letters could 

 by being thrown to the ground, compose a history, e.g. the Annals of 

 Ennius. 



Sir Jolm Herschel, in his discourse on ISTatural Philosophy, with 

 the resources of modem science at his command, puts this in another 

 light, and his argument is not affected by recent discoveries. 



" The discoveries of modem chemistry," he says, " have gone far to 

 " establish the truth of an opinion entertained by some of the ancients, 

 "that the universe consists of distinct, separate, indivisible atoms or 

 "individual things, so minute as to escape our senses, except when 

 " united by millions, and by this aggregation making up bodies of even 



