THK HE v. JAMKS MARTIN EA u. 523 
in a drop of water? All that we needed to make the 
action of the liquid intelligible was the assumption of Mr. 
Martineau's " homogeneous extended atomic solids," 
smoothly gliding over one another. But had we supposed 
the water to be nothing more than this, we should have 
ignorantly defrauded it of an intrinsic architectural power, 
which the art of man, even when pushed to its utmost de- 
gree of refinement, is incompetent to imitate. I would 
invite Mr. Martineau to consider how inappropiate his 
figure of a fictitious bank deposit becomes under these 
circumstances. The "account current" of matter re- 
ceives nothing at my hands which could be honestly 
kept back from it. If, then, "Democritus and the 
mathematicians" so defined matter as to exclude the 
powers here proved to belong to it, they were clearly wrong, 
and Mr. Martineau, instead of twitting me with my depar- 
ture from them/ ought rather to applaud me for correcting 
them.* 
The reader- of my^ small contributions to the literature 
which deals with the overlapping margins of science and 
theology, will have noticed how frequently I quote Mr. 
Emerson. I do so mainly because in him we have a poet 
and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely 
undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present, or 
prospective. In his case Poetry, with the joy of a bac- 
chanal, takes her graver brother Science by the hand, and 
cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scien- 
tific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer 
forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our present 
theme is touched upon in the lines: 
The journeying atoms, primordial wholes 
Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles. 
As regards veracity and insight these few words outweigh, 
in my estimation, all the formal learning expended by Mr. 
Martineau in those disquisitions on Force, where he treats 
the physicist as a conjuror, and speaks so wittily of atomic 
* Definition implies previous examination of the object defined, and 
is open to correction or modification as knowledge of the object in- 
creases. Such increased knowledge has radically changed our con- 
ceptions of the luminit'erous ether, converting its vibrations from 
longitudinal into transverse. Such changes also Mr. Martineau's 
conceptions of matter are doomed to undergo. 
