24 



rush backwards and forwards until destroyed by newly generated 

 sound-waves. 



But sound itself is but a sensation perceived by living 

 beings endowed with special apparatus for the reception of those 

 vibrations which cause it. Outside these living beings there 



IS NO SUCH THING AS SoUND. ThE WoRLD ITSELF IS PERFECTLY 



SILENT ; ALWAYS AND EVER. The final secret of Nature appears 

 to be motion. From this she constructs our world. 



We pass from sound to light, and we are still in the 

 domain of vibrations. 



The rhythmical motion of the waves of the ether give to 

 us light and colour. The intense physical and chemical changes 

 going on in the sun affect the ether, in which the sun is immersed, 

 and travel through it in multitudinous vibrations and with terrible 

 speed until they reach our eye. But outside the sentient eye 

 THERE IS NO LIGHT — Only motion. The non-sentient unr-erse 

 is- not only silent, it is unutterably dark. But motion is 

 everywhere. When the ether vibrates at the rate of 400 million 

 millions per second, the eye perceives red light. At about 

 double that frequency we see violet light. Above or below these 

 we see nothing at all. 



Heat, light, electricity, all i-esult from the rhythmical 

 vibration of the ether. 



FRIDAY, MAY 11th, 1900. 



E. PAYNE, M.A. 



SCIENTIFIC men have come to the conclusion that light and 

 electricity are identical in their nature, that all light is an 

 electrical phenomenon. This was the statement with which Mr. 

 Payne opened his lecture, and, in order to show why they had 

 come to this conclusion, Mr. Payne, who was provided with an 

 excellent set of electrical apparatus, performed, for the benefit of 

 his audience, a number of the experiments which had led the 

 scientists to such a position. 



If we accepted light as being electricity in a state of vibra- 

 tion, there was, he said, no difliculty in understanding the fact, 

 which the spectrum revealed, that there were degrees of light 



