50 ANDREW JACKSON HOWE. 



off a feeble light. The citation is to show that some 

 combinations of hydrogen are not potent transmitters 

 of light. It requires a powerful galvanic battery to 

 decompose water or to resolve it into ultimate atoms 

 or elements. Heat will rarefy water, converting it 

 into globules of moisture or into vapor. By cold and 

 hydrostatic pressure oxygen gas can be converted into 

 snow, and hydrogen into hail, which rattles as it falls 

 upon a floor. The illustration may aid in the concep- 

 tion of possibilities in matter. The time may come 

 when, in the expansion of scientific demonstrations, 

 ether may not only be made ponderable, but con- 

 densed into a solid and handled. If such an advance 

 be made in the manipulation of subtleties, "luminous 

 ether" may not prove to be a new element, but modi- 

 fied hydrogen. A writer of considerable acumen has 

 said, "that since every thing is black in the dark," it 

 follows that color is a property of light. Now light, 

 which is itself invisible, is due to oscillations or vibra- 

 tions set up in all directions by any luminous body 

 whether the sun or a rushlight in the ethereal 

 medium which prevades all space, and is composed of 

 rays of different refrangibility as from ether to air or 

 any denser medium. 



Another office ascribed to ether is that in the 

 conservation of energies, in the distributions and 

 recombinations of potential and kinetic activities, 

 there shall be no loss of power as there is no waste of 

 matter. In a discussion of the nebular theory the 

 points developed are such as render it possible to 

 leave out the hypothetical or ethereal medium whose 

 office is to fill space, and to become a receptacle for 

 the interchange of energies. As gaseous matter con- 

 denses, its capacity for storing heat decreases, hence 



