THE SEARCH FOR PRIMAL 

 MATTER 



SOME account has already been given of how Sir 

 Isaac Newton thought of light as a perfect hail of 

 minute atoms corpuscles, he called them. Wheth- 

 er from a white-hot body like the sun or a mild af- 

 fair like an ordinary candle, he saw these little fly- 

 ing chips of matter shooting off in every direction 

 at an incredible speed. It was Sir Isaac Newton 

 who, in fact, laid the foundations of what is called 

 the science of optics, and his ideas, and the mental 

 pictures he drew of these processes in nature which 

 go on beyond the reach of our senses, remained 

 dominant until well along in the last century. 



But theories, like plants and people, grow old, 



and by-and-by Newton's theories were decently 



put in the ground and a head -stone put up over 



them. They seemed of no more use to science 



or to man. Upon the foundation laid by an 



astonishingly versatile Englishman, Dr. Thomas 



Young, and the later work of a French physicist, 



:id, has been reared a wonderful fabric called 



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