34 THE WORLD MACHINE 



less ingenious than those which have enabled the astronomer 

 to divine and weigh dark suns, for ever invisible to the human 

 eye, so the present-day anatomist, with his refined objectives 

 and staining reagents, has penetrated the inner structure of 

 the cell itself, watched it enveloping, digesting, and ejecting 

 its food, joining in marriage with another, and then forming 

 the beautiful astral figures, so suggestive of a magnetic field, 

 which are preliminary to the birth of a new generation. 



Thus pressed, on the one side by the chemist, on the other 

 by the anatomist, we attend as it were the approaching juncture 

 of two armies, whose coalition will mean the explanation of 

 life in terms of valencies and atoms. 



" In the beginning was chaos," the tutor of Epicurus ex- 

 plained. " And where did chaos come from ? " the young man 

 asked. Following out the previsions of Democritus, advancing 

 knowledge has seen all existing things, the living and the life- 

 less, the sentient and the inert, reduced to the invisible, and 

 in the older view, indivisible atoms " the foundation-stones 

 of the universe." But what are the atoms ? What are these 

 seventy odd elementary substances which can no longer be 

 resolved ? Are they the " massy, hard, impenetrable particles " 

 that Newton fancied, " even so very hard as never to wear 'or 

 break in pieces ; no ordinary power being able to divide what 

 God made one in the first creation " ? 



We must wait for the answer. We seem to hover on the 

 brink of a new revelation, the explanation of matter itself of 

 matter and of the other great mystery, of electricity, as well. 

 A something smaller than the atom, the cathode " rays," the 

 electron or " corpuscle," seems to have been found. We live 

 in days of wonder, still. 



Meanwhile, however the newest discoveries may turn, we 

 know that in the spectra of the suns and stars the lines of many 

 of our so-called elements do not appear. Conceivably in the 

 fiercer heat of these blazing worlds some of the elements have 

 been resolved ; perchance, somewhere, all. They may be the 

 result of condensation and cooling from temperatures which 

 man has not yet been able to attain. Perchance in the primal 

 fire-mist there was but one, the urstoff, the protyl, of the cosmic 

 mind. 



We here reach bounds. Further the mind cannot go. Or 



