44 
NA ROLE 
[oo. II, 1869 
landscape, or whether 2 man with good eyes is shut up in 
a dark room, 
It is of this the poet speaks, when he says :— 
“O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live ; 
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud ! 
And would we aught behold of higher worth, 
Than that inanimate cold world allow’d 
To the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd,— 
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 
Enveloping the earth ; 
And from the soul itself must there be sent 
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
Of all sweet sounds the life and element !” 
But let us hasten to our friend Philosophus, who is a man 
of quite a different mould. Once, when he was young, his 
tutor said to him, “ Have the goodness, sir, to solve the 
following problem: ‘A hemispherical bowl is filled with a 
heavy fluid, the density of which varies as the zth power 
of the depth below the surface ; find the whole pressure 
and the resultant pressure on the semi-lune of the surface 
contained between two vertical planes passing through 
the centre of the bowl, and making with each other an 
angle 2/.’” But Philosophus thrust the paper violently 
aside, saying “I will have none of that,” and in fact was 
extremely rude. You may be sure, therefore, that when 
he came to be a man he had a mind of his own, and 
carried out his own ideas. He told us lately that he had 
been studying the laws of energy. It is a mistake, he 
said, to suppose that these laws are difficult of compre- 
hension ; they are merely remote from our ordinary con- 
ceptions, and must be patiently pursued until you grasp 
them. He had studied them, he said, at all times and on 
all occasions—in the railway carriage, on the thorough- 
fare, in the study, on his bed, in the night watches ; and 
now that he had come to perceive their exceeding 
grandeur, and beauty, and simplicity, they were a source 
of great and continual joy to him, and recompensed 
him more than a thousandfold for all the trouble he had 
taken. Philosophus lately told us certain truths which 
may, perhaps, be of service to the readers of NATURE. 
He said that, not far from London, there was a place 
where the spirits and understandings of men were annually 
ground to pieces in a huge machine made of the very best 
metal ; ay, such is its temper, said he, that were it only 
made into good broadswords, it might enable us to cleave 
our way to the very heart of the universe. Again, he said ; 
“No doubt the dulness of science is a cry of the blind; 
nevertheless, men of science are much to blame. It is 
their sense of beauty that leads them to Truth, whom they 
discover by means of the glorious garments which she 
wears. But she is immediately stripped of these, and 
dressed in an antiquated medizeval garb, worse than that 
of any charity-school girl, and equal to that of any Guy 
aux : no wonder that in such guise her beauty is un- 
perceived by those who cannot pierce the veil, and that 
as a consequence she is slightly esteemed.” 
There was another thing he told us—a thing of the 
highest importance. “The priests of Science,” he said, 
“must consent to use the vernacular, before they will ever 
make a profound impression upon the heart of humanity; 
and when they have learned to do this, let them not fear 
the snecrs of their deacons who will call their teaching 
sensational, Re Res. 
THE ATOMIC CONTROVERSY 
T is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the 
history of men, that they should in all times have 
sought the solution of human problems in the heavens 
rather than upon the earth. Sixty years ago a memorable 
instance of this truth occurred when Dalton borrowed 
from the stars an explanation of the fundamental pheno- 
mena of chemical combination. Carbon and oxygen 
unite in a certain proportion to form “carbonic acid ;” 
and this proportion is found to be invariable, no matter 
from what source the compound may have been prepared. 
But carbon and oxygen form one other combination, 
namely, “carbonic oxide”—the gas whose delicate blue 
flame we often see in our fires. Carbonic oxide may be 
obtained from many sources ; but, like carbonic acid, its 
composition is always exactly the same. These two 
bodies, then, illustrate the law of Definzte Proportions. 
But Dalton went a step further. He found that, for the 
same weight of carbon, the amount of oxygen in “ carbonic 
acid” was double that which exists in carbonic oxide. 
Several similar instances were found of two elements 
forming compounds in which, while the weight of the one 
remained constant, the other doubled, trebled, or quad- 
rupled itself. Hence the law of A7/ud/¢t7ple Proportions. 
The question was—in fact, the question is—how to account 
for these laws. Dalton soon persuaded himself that 
matter was made up of very small particles or mxzzma 
natuy@, not by any possibility to be reduced to a smaller 
magnitude. Matter could not be divisible without limit ; 
there must be a barrier somewhere. No doubt, as a 
chemist, he would have rejected the famous couplet — 
Big fleas have little fleas, upon their backs, to bite ’em ; 
And little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad tifinitum. 
| “Let the divisions be ever so minute,” he said, “the 
number of particles must be finite; just as in a given 
space of the universe, the number of stars and planets 
cannot be infinite. We might as well attempt to introduce 
a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one 
already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of 
hydrogen.” All substances, then, are composed of atoms ; 
and these attract each other, but at the same time keep 
their distance, just as is the case with the heavenly bodies. 
The atoms of one compound do not resemble those of 
another in weight, or size, or mutually gravitating power, 
But as they are indivisible, it is between them that we 
must conceive all chemical action to take place ; and an 
atom of any particular kind must always have the same 
weight. The atom of carbon weighs 5; the atom of 
oxygen weighs 7. Carbonic oxide, containing one of each 
must therefore be invariably constituted of 5 carbon, and 
7 oxygen: carbonic acid must in like manner contain 5 
carbon, and 14 oxygen. Here, then, Dalton not only 
states that he has accounted for the two laws we have 
mentioned by making a single assumption; but he 
evidently intends his theory to be used as a criterion or 
control in all future analytical results, and already views it 
as the birth-place of chemical enterprise. 
Such, and so great, was the atomic theory of Dalton ; 
founded, certainly, on erroneous numbers, but containing 
in itself the germ of their correction; aspiring to the 
command in innumerable conquests; and setting itself 
for the rise or fall of the chemical spirit. 
