REV. HARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS 253 



tion, Mr. Martineau would agree with me in ascribing the 

 building power displayed in the crystal to the bits of 

 water themselves. At all events, I should count upon his 

 sympathy so far as to believe that he would consider any 

 one unmannerly who would denounce me for rejecting this 

 notion of a separate soul, and for holding the snow-crystal 

 to be " matter." 



But then what an astonishing addition is here made to 

 the powers of matter! Who would have dreamed, without 

 actually seeing its work, that such a power was locked up 

 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 sup- 

 posed 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 degree of refinement, is incompetent to imitate. 

 I would invite Mr. Martineau to consider how inappro- 

 priate his figure of a fictitious bank deposit becomes under 

 these circumstances. The "account current" of matter 

 receives nothing at my hands which could be honestly 

 kept back from it. If, then, "Democritus and the mathe- 

 maticians' ' 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 departure from 

 them, ought rather to applaud me for correcting them. 1 



1 Definition implies previous examination of the object defined, and is open 

 to correction or modification as knowledge of the object increases. Such in- 

 creased knowledge has radically changed our conceptions of the luminiferous 

 ether, converting its vibrations from longitudinal into transverse. Such changes 

 also Mr. Martineau's conceptions of matter are doomed to undergo. 



