260 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. 



rather than to phenomena, induces that sublime indifference to facts 

 which has characterized the purely mathematical intellect of all ages. 



It is not surprising that a philosopher who has been engaged in 

 measuring the imaginary diameter, describing the imaginary oscilla- 

 tions and gyrations of imaginary atoms, and the still more complex 

 imaginary behavior of the imaginary constituents of the imaginary 

 atmospheres by which the mathematical imagination has surrounded 

 these imaginary atoms, should overlook the vulgar fact that neither 

 mosses nor other vegetables, nor even their seeds, can possibly retain 

 their vitality when ultimately exposed to the temperature of a blast 

 furnace, and that of two or three hundred degrees below the freezing 

 point ; but it is rather surprising that the purely mathematical basis 

 of this very original hypothesis of so great a mathematician should be 

 mathematically fallacious in plain language, a mathematical blunder. 



In order to supply the seed-bearing meteoric fragment by which 

 each planet is to be stocked with life, it is necessary, according to 

 Sir W. Thomson, that two worlds one at least flourishing with life 

 shall be smashed ; and, in order to get them smashed with a suffi- 

 cient amount of frequency to supply the materials for his hypothesis, 

 the learned President of the British Association has, in accordance 

 with the customary ingenuity of mathematical theorists, worked out 

 the necessary mathematical conditions, and states with unhesitating 

 mathematical assurance that " It is as sure that collisions must 

 occur between great masses moving through space, as it is that ships, 

 steered without intelligence directed to prevent collision, could not 

 cross and recross the Atlantic for thousands of years with immunity 

 from collision." 



The author of the paper in the Cornhill denies this very positively, 

 and without going into the mathematical details, points out the basis 

 upon which it may be mathematically refuted viz. that all such 

 worlds are travelling in fixed or regular orbits around, their primaries 

 or suns, while each of these primaries travels in its own necessary 

 path, carrying with it all its attendants, which still move about him, 

 just as though he had no motion of his own. 



These are the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, the sublime 

 simplicity of which contrasts so curiously with the complex dreams 

 of the modern atom-splitters, and which make a further and still 

 more striking contrast by their exact and perfect accordance with 

 actual and visible phenomena. 



Newton has taught us that there can be no planets travelling at 

 random like the Sir W. Thomson's imaginary ships with blind pilots, 

 and by following up his reasoning, we reach the conclusion, that 

 among all the countless millions of worlds that people the infinity of 

 space, there is no more risk of collision than there is between any 

 two of the bodies that constitute our own solar system. 



All the observations of astronomers, both before and since the dis- 

 covery of the telescope, confirm this conclusion. The long nightly 

 watching of the Chaldean shepherds, the star-counting, star-gauging, 

 star-mapping, and other laborious gazing of mediaeval and modern 

 astronomers, have failed to discover any collision, or any motion 

 tending to collision, among the myriads of heavenly bodies whose 

 positions and movements have been so faithfully and diligently 

 studied. Thus, the hypothesis of creation which demands the destruc- 

 tion of two worlds in order to effect the sowing of a seed, is as 



