THE AUTHOR'S THEORIES OUTLINED 53 



different things; the former not being "conserved" 

 while the latter is. Hence, no matter how "strong" 

 gravity may be, they say, it cannot find resurrection in 

 the form of heat or any other sort of power, but dies 

 with the act it performs, whereas "energy", they add, 

 can never die, but lives forever in a continuous chain of 

 transmutations. Should you think to answer by saying : 

 "But when an object falls and strikes the ground, does 

 it not produce heat! And is its fall not due to gravity! 

 And is not gravity, therefore, in this instance at least, 

 conserved? they will answer you, as does Mr. Soddy, 

 (v. p. 16) by denying that gravity is responsible for 

 the fall and declaring it to be a mere "fiction." 

 Against such resources in argument I cannot hope 

 to prevail. Gravitation is a force, or it is not 

 force. If only a fiction, let us blot it out of scientific 

 parlance and change the law to read: A fiction varies 

 inversely as the square of the distance and directly as 

 the product of the masses. I reiterate, that just as our 

 scientists wantonly thrust aside the greatest of dyna- 

 mical factors, the stellar resultant, in their interpreta- 

 tion of the celestial motions, so do they here repudiate 

 the incomparably great heat-generating factor of static 

 self-compression. The heat thus generated in per- 

 petuity I call gravistatic heat. 



Compressive forces, however, have other dynamical 

 possibilities. You may detonate a stick of dynamite by 

 warming it, by striking it, or by immersing it in certain 

 acids. You may also explode it by gradually increased 

 pressure. Reasoning from multitudinous analogies, is 

 there not every ground for assuming that all substances 

 are explosible given only the necessary degree of pres- 

 sure ? This, at least, is my hypothesis, and I base it on 

 the well-known converse scientific principle that every 

 gas has what is called its critical temperature point at 

 which no amount of applied pressure is able to reduce 

 it to a solid or liquid state. Now, taking the sun's in- 

 tense temperature merely as an overt fact without 

 bothering about its explanation, his central temperatures 



