I 



A WONDERFUL WORLD 



mils one to a world that does indeed seem unreal 

 and fantastic. " If my bark sinks," says the poet, 

 " 't is to another sea." If the mind breaks through 

 what we call gross matter, and explores its interior, 

 it finds itself indeed in a vast under or hidden 

 world a world almost as much a creation of the 

 imagination as that visited by Alice in Wonder- 

 land, except that the existence of this world is ca- 

 pable of demonstration. It is a world of the infin- 

 itely little which science interprets in terms of the 

 infinitely large. Sir Oliver Lodge sees the molecular 

 spaces that separate the particles of any material 

 body relatively like the interstellar spaces that sepa- 

 rate the heavenly bodies. Just as all the so-called 

 solid matter revealed by our astronomy is almost in- 

 finitesimal compared with the space through which 

 it is distributed, so the electrons which compose the 

 matter with which we deal are comparable to the 

 bodies of the solar system moving in vast spaces. It 

 is indeed a fantastic world where science conceives 

 of bodies a thousand times smaller than the hydro- 

 gen atom the smallest body known to science; 

 where it conceives of vibrations in the ether millions 

 of millions times a second; where we are bombarded 

 by a shower of corpuscles from a burning candle, or 

 a gas-jet, or a red-hot iron surface, moving at the 

 speed of one hundred thousand miles a second ! But 

 this almost omnipotent ether has, after all, some of 

 the limitations of the finite. It takes time to trans- 

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