THE ftV. JAM US MARTIN EAV. 



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 luminiferous ether, converting its vibrations from 

 longitudinal into transverse. Such changes also Mr. Martineau's 

 conceptions of matter are doomed to undergo. 



