46 THE NATURE OF MATTER 



expected to sustain this contention, and in the first version 

 of his attack on Haeckel (in the Hibbert, January, 1905) he 

 said : " It is singular that even during Haeckel's lifetime 

 the atom shows signs of breaking up into stuff which is not 

 ordinary matter." If he had meant that it was a singular 

 joy for Haeckel to see his amateur physical speculation 

 fulfilled during his lifetime, this would be admirable. 

 Unfortunately, he meant the reverse. It is still more per- 

 plexing to find that Sir Oliver wrote these words apropos of 

 Haeckel's insistence on the conservation of matter ; whereas 

 he now tells us in his work (p. 29) that " the constancy of 

 fundamental material still holds good, even though the 

 atoms are resolved into electric charges." Nor is his 

 misrepresentation of Haeckel relieved when he describes him 

 as a " Materialistic-Monist, with a limitation of the term 

 'matter' to the terrestrial chemical elements and their com- 

 binations i.e., to that form of substance to which the human 

 race has grown accustomed a sense which tends to exclude 

 ethereal [italics mine] and other generalisations and unknown 

 possibilities such as would occur to a philosophic Monist of 

 the widest kind "(p. in). Seeing that Haeckel devotes 

 several pages (78-81) to ether, which he regards as the 

 fundamental entity, in the very book which Sir Oliver 

 professes to be criticising, this is strange work. 



Let us finish with this sorry story of Sir Oliver Lodge's 

 physical criticisms of Haeckel before we proceed to 

 construct. None but a fool would expect a chapter on 

 physics, written by a biologist several years before the dis- 

 covery of radium, to be free from error. A Sir Oliver Lodge 



