292 HENRY A. EOWLAND 



Again, an electric wire as large as a knitting needle, surrounded 

 with a tube half an inch in diameter in which a perfect vacuum has 

 been made to prevent the escape of electricity, may convey to a dis- 

 tance a thousand horse-power, indeed even ten thousand or more horse- 

 power, there being apparently no limit to the amount the ether can 

 carry. 



Compare this with the steam-engine, where only a few hundred 

 horse-power require an enormous and clumsy steam pipe. Or, again, 

 the amount carried by a steel shaft, which, at ordinary rate of speed, 

 would require to be about a foot in diameter to transmit 10,000 horse- 

 power. 



When we compare the energy transmitted through a square foot of 

 ether in waves, as in the case of the sun, with the amount that can be 

 conveyed by means of sound waves in air or even sound waves in steel, 

 the comparison becomes simply ridiculous, the ether being so im- 

 mensely superior. As quick as light, the ether sends its wave energy 

 to the distance of a million miles while the sluggard air carries it one. 

 Thus, with equal strain on each, the ether carries away a million times 

 the energy that the air could do. 



4th. The ether must account for gravitation. For this purpose we 

 are allowed no time whatever to transmit the attraction. As soon as 

 the position of two bodies is altered, just so soon must the line of action 

 from one to the other be in the straight line between them. 



If this were not so, the motion of the planets around the sun would 

 be greatly altered. Toward the invention of such an ether, capable 

 of carrying on all these actions at once, the minds of many scientific 

 men are bent. Now and then we are able to give the ether such proper- 

 ties as to explain one or two of the phenomena, but we always come 

 into conflict with other phenomena that equally demand explanation. 



There is one trouble about the ether which is rather difficult to 

 explain, and that is the fact that it does not seem to concentrate itself 

 about the heavenly bodies. As far as we are able to test the point, 

 light passes in a straight line through space even when near one of 

 the larger planets, unless the latter possesses an atmosphere. This 

 could hardly happen unless the ether was entirely incompressible or 

 else possessed no weight. 



If the ether is the cause of gravitation, however, it is placed out- 

 side the category of ordinary matter, and it may thus have no weight 

 although still having inertia, a thing impossible for ordinary matter 

 where the weight is always exactly proportional to inertia. 



