ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. LV 
vail of matter by the East Indian philosophy of the Upanishads, or 
by the visionary dialectic of Cleanthes, was posited there by meta- 
physical physics. The invisible fluid posited by modern science 
behind the vail of matter is posited there by physical metaphysics. 
The vortices of Democritus as well as the vortices of Descartes 
are the creations of metaphysical physics. The vortices of Helm- 
holtz and of Sir William Thompson are the creations of physical 
metaphysics. The fixed and crystalline sphere of the old Ptole- 
maic astronomers was an invention of metaphysical physics. The 
solid ether which transmits to us the light of the stellar Universe, 
and which, as Sir John Herschell remarks, is the modern “ realiza- 
tion of the ancient idea of the crystalline orb,” is the invention 
of physical metaphysics. When Lucretius finds in the iridescent 
hues of the peacock’s tail, as it shimmers in the sun, a fresh type 
and instance of Nature’s prodigality in the display of atoms, he 
does but yield another contingent to the barren store of his meta- 
physical physics. When Dr. John Tyndall finds in the iridescences 
of the common soap bubble a proof that stellar space is a plenum 
filled with a material substance that is capable of transmitting 
motion with a rapidity that would girdle the equatorial’ earth eight 
times in a second, he does but yield another contingent to the fertile 
store of his physical metaphysics. When Dr. George Cheyne, of 
Scotland, expressed the opinion in the last century, that “all ani- 
mals, of what kind soever, were originally and actually created at 
once by the hand of Almighty God, it being impossible (he said) to 
account for their production by any laws of mechanism ;” and 
when he further held that “every individual animal has, in minimis, 
actually included in its loins all those who shall descend from it, 
and every one of these again has all its offspring lodged in its loins, 
and so on ad infinitum,” and that “all this infinite number of ani- 
malcules may be lodged in the bigness of a pin’s head,’’* he preached 
a biological doctrine which sounds in the terms of metaphysical 
physics. When Mr. Darwin in his provisional theory of Pangenesis 
assumes the existence of the gemmules which inherit innumerable 
qualities from ancestral sources, and which prelude as gemmules 
that struggle for existence which antedates and therefore condition- 
ates the terms of the human struggle witnessed in society, commerce, 
and national life, he expounds a biological doctrine which sounds 
just as clearly in the terms of physical metaphysics. When old 
* J. Brown: Locke and Sydenham, p. 270. 
