78 DIVISIBILITY OF MATTER ATOMIC THEORY 



atoms the material of all creation, either by inherent 

 energy of their own, or acted upon by a creative 

 power from without. It cannot be said that any im- 

 portant advance has been made upon these views 

 until approaching closely to our own time ; though the 

 great names of Bacon and Newton enter into the dis- 

 cussion, the former expanding and extolling the doc- 

 trine of Democritus on the subject ; the latter, in one of 

 his wonted pregnant sentences, denoting those quali- 

 ties of ultimate atoms which he deems essential to the 

 uses for which God created them. The monads of 

 Leibnitz and the living organic molecules are little 

 more than variations of the same ancient theme naked 

 hypotheses, without any show of verification by facts. 

 The doctrine of Boscovich regarding the attractions 

 and repulsions of matter as associated with mathema- 

 tical points, or centres of force, is better worthy of 

 note, not solely to our present purpose, but as one of 

 those large views which concentrate around them nu- 

 merous facts otherwise insulated or anomalous. The 

 atomic theory of gravitation of Le Sage, and that 

 more recently propounded by Mosotti, belong to the 

 history of this enquiry, but have done little to advance 

 its progress. 



It is, indeed, as already stated, to the chemical dis- 

 coveries of the last half-century that we owe what may 

 now be fairly called Atomic Science. Studied through 

 the multiplicity, yet mathematical fixedness, of their 

 combinations, atoms and molecules, though unseen as 

 such, have become intellectually realities to our know- 

 ledge first by analysis, and more recently by syn- 



