1874.] Atomic Matter and Luminiferous Ether. 193 
interesting, philosophically, as the waves of the sea, and 
enable us more easily to understand how multitudinous 
vibrations may coexist in an elastic body which as a whole is 
stationary. 
Sir Charles Wheatstone’s experiment helps to carry this 
same idea much further. The tones of a tune played ona 
piano are conveyed through a wooden rod, and rendered 
audible in a distant room. Various fundamental notes of 
different intensities and in different sequence as to time, 
accompanied by their overtones or clang, and all the 
mechanical noises due to the mechanism of the piano, &c., 
pass through a wooden rod, thinned at its end to stand 
without interruption between two strings, and so rest on the 
sounding board. 
The wooden rod may be replaced by a glass rod, or bya 
metal rod, or by a column of fluid. ‘That air conveys these 
sounds is our daily experience. 
At the same time that sonorous vibrations pass, we may 
pass heat, light, electricity, or magnetism, and if a suitable 
fluid medium be employed, mechanical waves and motion 
and chemical action may also simultaneously proceed. 
Through the Atlantic cable two messages can pass at the 
- same time from different directions. We talk across each 
other, and at the same instant hear many sounds from 
different directions; and an indefinite number of people can 
together see numberless rays of light reflected from the 
same point on a refleCting surface, and countless rainbows 
refracied in one rain drop. 
From a seed may grow a tree, and from the tree a forest. 
The germinating cell or group of cells in the seed possess 
motion of such a form that its communication is the cause 
of this development; and the development from this cause 
occurs in, and is communicated by, continuous atomic 
matter. In continuance and complicity, the communication 
of motion constituting vegetable and animal vitalism or 
growth has no known parallel. Tangible matter, therefore, 
does transmit forms of motion of all kinds, and appears to 
be elastic; and if elastic, needs no medium for transmitting 
motion, and the so-called necessity for the hypothesis of 
ether disappears. 
The conclusion, then, must be, it is more philosophical to 
endow appreciable matter, even hypothetically, with the 
qualities it appears to possess, than to create matter of an 
unknown kind in order to endow it with qualities we see, 
but refuse to appreciate, in matter that lies before us. 
