Baehe.] J-^^ [April 20, 



ouswith the sether of space, acts, through the rays of light and heat 

 on the particles and minute water masses, generating in their inter- 

 action, as the visible resultant of the forces in play, the movement 

 of the particles in suspension in aqueous solutions. But, if the 

 cause of the movements assigned by Herr Wiener were the true 

 one, the same cause ought to be operative in the case of alcohol 

 and in that of the fixed and volatile oils : but it is not. This con- 

 clusion of Herr Wiener's seems to me to be derived from the un- 

 satisfactory fact of a coincidence, of which kind of proof we habitu- 

 ally perceive more than enough to obscure, bewilder, and often to 

 baffle our feeble efforts to penetrate beyond the veil of phenomena, 

 of things as they seem, to the everlasting noumena, things as they 

 are, near the inscrutable throne of nature. 



I will not weary my hearers with the recital of the numerous 

 details of my own experiments, the names of the substances that I 

 tried, the modes in which they were treated, the manipulations of 

 various sorts necessary to the prosecution of the work. Every one 

 knows the difficulties that will arise in new investigations, which 

 will themselves suggest the means of countervailing them as the 

 work proceeds. In this particular case one difficulty was to obtain 

 finely enough divided matter in other liquids besides water. It 

 may be interesting to mention that I did not read anything on the 

 subject until my own experiments were nearly finished. By this 

 course I avoided any possible bias expressed or implied in the 

 directions to be pursued and the conclusions to be drawn, and I 

 had ultimately the satisfaction to perceive, as I had often before 

 observed, how, owing to the constitution of the mind, men neces- 

 sarily follow the same general and often particular track in their 

 procedures. It is not in the course they follow, that they differ 

 much, but in the conclusions which they reach in pursuing what is 

 virtually the same way. Fortunately for me, constrained to be 

 absent for months in the field on geodetic duty, and at all times 

 constantly engaged at my profession, night still lent itself to my 

 slowly accumulated results. That the investigation was most inter- 

 esting, I need hardly say. 



As electric currents have been demonstrated in the human body, 

 I naturally thought that all slight differences of tension between the 

 liquid and particles, or in the liquid itself, might set up electric cur- 

 rents. Therefore I passed the galvanic current through liquids filled 

 with particles, watching them carefully. There was not the slightest 



