BIONOMICS 205 



A man lives and thinks and feels and acts, by power, absolutely 

 of retaining within his complex cells a measure of water. Both flower 

 and man can live longer without food than they can live without water. 



What then is Water this mystical, ductile, limpid, lovely, 

 iridescent, smiling thing? This treacherous, forceful, resistless, 

 terrible, tremendous thing ; without which, alike in its meekness and 

 in its potency, earth would be a spectral Sahara, colourless, lifeless, 

 mindless, loveless? 



It seems forced upon us to believe that Water may be highly- 

 tempered Electricity, liquid and latent, and yet not so far transformed 

 from its more strenuous mode as to be unrecognisable. 



Oxygen, "the life-giving air," very breath of life as it is, would 

 seem to be, indeed, molecular electricity, generated by vegetation from 

 the waves of electrons which the sun rains down upon us in unceasing 

 flow. 



In the air it exists as a molecule, a positive atom yoked, it may be, 

 to a negative atom, and subjugated further by insulation of the inert 

 nitrogen. 



In water, oxygen is still further subjugated by its yoke-mate 

 hydrogen. It becomes thus snow for the lily-cup ; milk for the babe. 

 Yet at a call it rises in force irresistible; rushes in river, forges in 

 torrent, towers in iceberg, or, as steam, reveals its Titan power in the 

 thunder of turbines. 



The same writer states : 



There is evidence that the negative corpuscle, a number of which 

 corpuscles keep the positive electron at poise in the atom, although a 

 thousand times smaller in size, is nevertheless equal in potence to the 

 positive electron. This would seem to imply that the blind destructive 

 force is antagonised a thousandfold by its counterpoising mate. 



And further : 



Radium, the forces in the atom of which are no longer held in 

 equipoise and conservation, but are perpetually discharging themselves 

 from intra-atomic stability and thus travelling toward self-annihilation, 

 shows us the blind destructive mode of prima materies when no longer 

 held static, and so rendered constructive and evolutionary. The Radium 

 atom the most active atom known, which is all the while degenerating 

 into Lead, the most inert must be regarded accordingly as Matter in 

 course of devolution. 



The Radium atom would seem to be thus a miniature hell in which, 

 having become de-polarised from Higher Ordinance, it consumes itself 

 in its own fires. And despite some scientific enthusiasms concerning it, 

 because of certain alternative effects exerted by its emanations upon 

 living tissues (suppressions of symptoms is not cure, however), its 



