152 
GUESSINGS AT TRUTH 
Te 
LD SPENSER, in his wondrous Allegory, tells 
us— 
 . . . he, that never woz/d, 
Could never :—” 
We are constantly reminded that we must creep before 
we can walk. So that we cannot look coldly or sarcastic- 
ally on 
«|. . budding Genius’ earliest essiye,” 
provided always that we are sure of the earliness, For 
there often is a strange resemblance between the erratic 
first flights of the scientific fledgeling and the habitual 
evolutions of the time-hardened Paradoxer or of the 
Paper-Scientist. 
Besides the mere dozen or so of really successful 
Physicists, all that the world seems able to produce at 
any one time, even in these later years, and whose efforts 
can at the best be rarely called more than Gwesses, there 
is an untold multitude whose Guessézgs are irrepressible. 
These, unlike some at least of the former, never hide 
their light under a bushel. From week to week we view 
with curious awe the increasing piles of pamphlets under 
which our shelves and table sag, groan, and crack! Let 
us make an effort, and get rid of some of them. Not to 
the waste-basket —at least not at once —for there is 
something in almost every bundle of hay (in the Soudan 
it is not needles, but bricks and slag), and this is usually 
worth searching for, were it only in the interests of justice 
to those who have thus (unconsciously ?) hidden them. 
We take the bundles as they come; many are rotten and 
can be tossed aside at once, others require more careful 
scrutiny. 
The first we light upon is by our particularly modest 
contributor John O’Toole.!| [He does not seem to be 
aware of the powers of Peroxide of Hydrogen, which 
(though we did not proclaim the fact) enabled us on a 
former occasion easily to penetrate his zzcognzte. But his 
secret is safe with us.] His present work is a singularly 
quaint protest against the modern abuse of elementary 
dynamical terms, and as such is well worthy of careful 
perusal. There can be little doubt that, of all physical 
subjects, as presented in an elementary form to the 
beginner, Dynamics is the most repulsive. And it stands 
at the very threshold. Mr. O’Toole shows the natural 
working of a clear, logical, mind in the middle of the 
present chaos. His pamphlet is one which should be read 
by all; for, though he hits all round and sometimes 
attacks the very giants of Science, he invariably hits fair 
as well as hard. It would take a whole article to discuss 
fully the questions he raises : suffice it to say that the root 
of the confusion which he so justly exposes is that little, 
but much-abused word force; and to quote the following 
pregnant sentence as showing his point of view :— 
““ When we behold . . . a group or sequence of phenomena, 
we insert force among them of ourselves, because we know from 
experience that if our organism were substituted for the acting 
or resisting body, we should have the sensation of pressure.” 
Next we take a couple of smaller, but more ambitious, 
pamphlets *:—in each of which the Past, Present, and 
Future of the Universe are promptly settled, though the 
terms of settlement are by no means identical. When 
we find, however, that Herr Zehnder, in the second 
sentence of his pamphlet, says that insuperable objections 
can be raised against the hypotheses of Helmholtz as well 
as against those of Kant, Herschel, and Laplace, decause 
they take too little account of the extsting laws of 
mechanics, we begin to understand him; and we have 
® Ausa Dynamica. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., 1884. 
2 Ueber dre Entwickelung des Weltalls und den Ewigen Kreislauf der 
Materie. Von L. Zehnder. Basel, 1885. 
On the Future of Life and the Universe, according to Science. Dundee: 
W. A. Drummond, 1883. 
NATURE 
[Fune 18, 1885 
only to turn over a few pages to find him thoroughly 
revealed. His bugbear is the Dissipation of Energy :— 
and he informs us that the “ Eternal Circulation of Matter” 
—in virtue of which all aggregations such as the sun will 
ultimately explode into their former nebulous condition, 
to recommence their condensation, &c.,—is an immediate 
consequence of THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONSERVATION 
OF LIGHT! 
Our rival author sums up As Kreislauf as follows :— 
“*, . . life, matter, and all things, are the necessary and 
inevitable outcome of the existence of Space. Space or Room, 
in any form whatever, must of necessity be a form of force or 
energy, and all things are just phases or manifestations of the 
working of this force or energy ; the Earth is dissolving in Space 
like a lump of Salt in Water, but New Worlds are being formed 
in Suns ; this dissolving and forming process will go on for ever ; 
and consequently life will be eternal; . . .” 
This is a step in advance even of Descartes, with whom 
Space and Matter were the same. We leave to the reader 
to judge which of the two has the more grotesquely 
grinned through the horse-collar, the German Swiss or 
the Scotsman. 
Our next step is a large one, no less than from the 
Universe to the Atom.! The work now before us is a 
very curious one. The author has hunted widely for his 
materials, and (very naturally) selects such only as suit 
his theory. So long as he can utilise Sir W. Thomson or 
Clerk-Maxwell he does so ; but, when he finds their state- 
ments incompatible with his theory, he has no difficulty 
in picking up what he wants from Zeuner, Rtihlmann, 
Deschanel, &c. Heseems, however, not to be acquainted 
with the elaborate work of Athanase Dupré. This is un- 
fortunate, for in it he would have found little difficulty in 
obtaining whatever he might require. The object of the 
essay, briefly stated, is to frame a theory of the liquid and 
solid states, somewhat on the lines of the kinetic gas- 
theory :—only it seems we must have a mutual force 
between particles, whose law is something between the 
inverse 4th and inverse 5th powers of the distance. But 
somehow the law itself seems to vary with the distance ; 
so that “we must apply the theory of probabilities to 
determine the potential at any centre due to the surround- 
ing atoms.” As a striking instance of Mr. Whiting’s 
extensive range of quotation, we note that he refers, for 
the sum of a common series (given everywhere in ele- 
mentary text-books of Trigonometry), to no less august 
an authority than Riemann in his Partéelle Differential- 
gleichungen / Ve do not venture farther to criticise the 
work of a writer who can, as a matter of course, invoke 
such irresistible authorities. 
We now come to a whole series of memoirs, tracts, 
letters, and pamphlets :—usually of American origin :~- 
which deal specially with the vexed question of the Sun’s 
temperature. From these we select one only, as the work 
of the most persistent, if not the most lucid or successful, 
of the many mere guessers on this subject.2 For the 
others consult Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine, 
&c., passim. Something, if not very much, has been done 
in this matter in Europe. Pouillet, J. Herschel, Crova, 
Rosetti, Violle, and others have at all events gone to 
work in a scientific way :—though (as is obvious from the 
results of Prof. Langley recently given in our columns) 
the values obtained by them can be but very rough 
approximations. A few of Mr. Ericsson’s weightier say- 
ings will pretty well show the value and character of his 
treatise. At p. 58 we are told that 
*« . . . the actinometer merely shows the thermometric inter- 
val of solar intensity on Fahrenheit’s scale, without reference to 
the position of that interval on a scale which commences at the 
accepted ‘absolute zero.’ I regard this absolute zero, however, 
as an @ynis-fatuus, retreating as fast as we approach it.” 
* A New Theory of Cohesion, &c. By Harold Whiting. (Cambridge, 
U.S., University Press, 1884.) 
2 Solar Heat (an Extract from a work on “ Radiant Heat”). By John 
Ericsson. New York, 1885. 
