CHAPTER II. 



MATTER AND ITS FORCE. 



Atomagnetism. What Prof. Huxley would like to know. Matter and 

 Motion. Every Atom a Magnet. Law of Atoms. Like attracts 

 Like. Unlike poles Attract. Atomagnetism the law of attraction 

 and repulsion. Examples. Experiments with Filings. How 

 Atoms combine their Polarity. Herbert Spencer's Philosophy. 

 His Foundation Loosened. 



HAVING in the preceding chapter shown what the two great 

 classes of matter are, we now proceed to explain the lorce which 

 governs them in all their movements and products, and to 

 which we have given the name of Atomagnetism. 



It is this law which Prof. Huxley, as shewn in the following 

 quotation, has been striving after without success. In an 

 article on Bishop Berkeley's works in Macmillan's Magazine 

 1871, he says : " There is a passage in the preface to the first 

 edition of the Principia, which shews that Newton was 

 penetrated as completely as Descartes, with the belief that all 

 the phenomena of nature are expressible in terms of matter and 

 motion." It is this " Many circumstances lead me to suspect, 

 that all th'ose phenomena may depend upon certain forces, in 

 virtue of which, the particles of bodies, by causes not yet 

 known, are either mutually impelled against one another and 

 cohere into regular figures, or repel or recede from one another ; 



