Ancient and Modern Seience. 41 



chemical elements to be bodies aggregated together 

 by the action of a positive and a negative force. 

 I^et me just remind you of this, because some 

 amongst you go so eagerly after modern science 

 and despise your own literature. If you had read 

 your Vishnu Pur ana, with your brain, and not 

 merely with your eyes through modern spectacles, 

 you might have learnt that theory of Sir William 

 Crookes long, long before he gave it. He has 

 drawn a picture, and the picture shows an immov- 

 able axis, and around it a spiral coil, and at points 

 in that coil are atoms of the chemical elements, 

 generated by that coil which represents a swing- 

 ing and cooling force. That spiral is in the great 

 ocean of protyle, or primeval matter, and, as that 

 spiral goes round and round the immovable axis, 

 it generates chemical elements one after another, 

 and so brings into existence the materials out of 

 which the world is to be formed. That is the 

 dry scientific statement summarised from his own 

 address. But I have read in an ancient book of a 

 mountain which is the emblem of stability, of an 

 axis round which everything is to revolve thrown 

 into a mighty ocean ; and I have read of a great 

 serpent turned round that mountain in spiral coils ; 

 on the one side the Suras are pulling and on the 

 other side the Asuras are equally busy. Between the 



