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590 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
research in this direction ? By no means, for science is surely tracing out the path 
of inquiry that leads in the direction of the unknown. What is complained of, 
is that its disciples are too prone to stop at each step in advance, as if there was 
nothing beyond. Or it may be stated in another form: Science has so long com- 
batted mere dogma, and soo utterly dethroned special providence, miracle and 
chance, that itself has become timid before the idea of the supernatural, and like 
the old creed builders who trembled at a fact, these scientists dread anything that 
suggests itself beyond the forces of the laboratory. They are almost as free to 
burn a heretic as were their persecutors inthe past. If research leads to the bor- 
der land between science, as we deal with it, and something beyond our methods, 
we must face it, and follow it as we may. 
And now, leaving spectroscopic science on its hydrogen frontier, let us see 
what has been done in the laboratory. Here the progress has been greater than 
in the other field, but in the same direction. Of course reference is made to the 
experiments of Prof. Crookes, in what he calls, after Faraday, ‘‘ radiant matter.” 
And allow a digression here, for the benefit of those who have refused to accept 
what they may choose to call the unsupported testimony of Crookes, to say that 
within the month his experiments have been repeated and the truth of his theory 
demonstrated by our own great countryman, Henry Draper, before a large num- 
ber of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. 
This radiant, or as it is usually termed, the fourth state of matter, suggests 
another plea for hypothesis. What has now been demonstrated to the eye is but 
the proof by experiment of the hypothesis of Faraday, suggested sixty-five years 
ago, so that it cannot be said to be entirely new, but which men who did not want 
to think or who could not think, have ever since regarded as a vagary of that 
great mind. The formula for matter has been solid, liquid, gaseous, and to these 
Faraday had added radiant. Now science took no note, when it rejected this 
fourth condition, of the fact that it had stopped for a long period at the dual char- 
acter of matter—solid and fluid—and that the gaseous was only a comparatively 
modern innovator. Still this did not prevent an incredulous, not to say a pitying, 
sympathetic smile, at this vagary of Faraday. Yet despite the still slow accept- 
ance of it, it is a fact, proven to the’eye before the British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, the French Academy and, as noticed above, before our 
own American Society. 
It is not the purpose here to describe the phenomena attending the experi- 
ments that demonstrate the existence of this fourth state of matter; only to note 
that in some of them the phenomena are in conflict with the accepted laws of 
matter heretofore recognized as immutable, and that it has different properties 
from any of the three. It evolves colors, and when intercepted by a solid body 
casts a shadow ; it is deflected from a straight line by a magnet, moves spirally, 
it exerts mechanical action where it strikes, and produces heat when its motion is 
arrested. 
Now, these phenomena show, some of them, that what the experimenter was 
