THE ETHER AND PONDERABLE MATTER 



nothing of light, of radiant heat, of electricity, or mag- 

 netism ; without it there would probably be no such 

 thing as gravitation ; nay, they even hint that without 

 this strange something, ether, there would be no such 

 thing as matter in the universe. If these contentions of 

 the modern physicist are justified, then this intangible 

 ether is incomparably the most important as well as the 

 "largest and most uniform substance or body" in the 

 universe. Its discovery may well be looked upon as the 

 most important feat of our century. 



For a discovery of our century it surely is, in the 

 sense that all the known evidences of its existence have 

 been gathered in this epoch. True, dreamers of all ages 

 have, for metaphysical reasons, imagined the existence 

 of intangible fluids in space they had, indeed, peopled 

 space several times over with different kinds of ethers, 

 as Maxwell remarks but such vague dreamings no more 

 constituted the discovery of the modern ether than the 

 dream of some pre-Columbian visionary that land might 

 lie beyond the unknown waters constituted the discov- 

 ery of America. In justice it must be admitted that 

 Huyghens, the seventeenth-century originator of the un- 

 dulatory theory of light, caught a glimpse of the true 

 ether; but his contemporaries and some eight genera- 

 tions of his successors were utterly deaf to his claims ; 

 so he bears practically the same relation to the nine- 

 teenth-century discoverers of ether that the Norseman 

 bears to Columbus. 



The true Columbus of the ether was Thomas Young. 

 His discovery was consummated in the early days of the 

 present century, when he brought forward the first con- 

 clusive proofs of the undulato^ theory of light. To 

 say that light consists of undulations is to postulate 



231 



