376 MOLECULES. 



from one to another; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of 

 the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built 

 up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth. A 

 molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes 

 its vibrations in precisely the same time. 



Each molecule, therefore, throughout the universe, bears impressed on it the 

 stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at 

 Paris, or the double royal cubit of the Temple of Karnac. 



No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of 

 molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule 

 is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. 



None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, hn 

 produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We 

 therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity 

 of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural. 



On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of 

 the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential 

 character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal 

 and self-existent. 



Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the 

 point at which Science must stop. Not that Science is debarred from study i 

 the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any 

 more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But 

 in tracing back the history of matter Science is arrested when she assures 

 herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other, 

 that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural 



Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of 

 nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we 

 have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must 

 have been created. 



It is only when we contemplate, not matter in itself, but the form in 

 which it actually exists, that our mind finds something on which it can lay 

 hold. 



That matter, as such, should have certain fundamental properties that it 

 should exist in space and be capable of motion, that its motion should be 

 persistent, and so on, are truths which may, for anything we know, be of 



