80 DR GEORGE WILSON ON THE FINITE DIVISIBILITY OF MATTER. 
permit this self-dividing force to come into play, and the result, according to 
Wo ttaston, will shew whether the mass undergoing spontaneous division is infi- 
nitely divisible or not. This experiment we cannot try; but it has long ago been 
performed for us by the hand of Nature. Our atmosphere has divided itself to 
the utmost limit which its susceptibility of division permitted, and has thereby 
tested or ascertained that divisibility for us. Either that is infinite, in which 
case, the atmosphere must have spread into space, and portions of it will be found 
surrounding the different heavenly bodies, varying in amount according to their 
respective dimensions, temperatures and the like. Or it is finite, and the air has 
found a limit at no great distance from the earth; for the particles of which it 
consists, although free, so far as their mutual repulsiveness is concerned, to re- 
cede from each other, are not equally free to recede from the earth, to which the 
force of gravitation binds them. They must come to rest accordingly at the point 
where the attraction of gravitation is equal in amount, while it is opposite in di- 
rection to the force of repulsion among them; so that they are balanced in equi- 
librio between them. Now it appears on making the necessary observations, 
that probably the Sun, and certainly that Jupiter, is devoid of an atmosphere of 
the same nature as our own. Therefore, concludes WoLLASTON, our atmosphere is 
of finite extent, and consists of particles only finitely divisible. And as the air 
cannot be supposed to be peculiar in this respect, the conclusion is immediately 
extended to every other substance, and all matter is inferred to consist of finitely 
divisible particles, or bond jide atoms. 
It cannot surprise us that so remarkable a paper as WoLLaAsTon’s should have 
excited the greatest attention among men of science. If the argument pursued 
in it were just, the vexed question of the finite or infinite divisibility of matter, 
which, for some thousand years, physics and metaphysics had alike sought in vain 
to decide either way, had all the while been answered for us. Every-attempt to- 
wards the solution of that problem by experiment had failed, not perhaps, be- 
cause ultimate atomic particles had not been arrived at, by the dividing forces 
our command, (for this length the inquiry never reached); but because, 
long before the divisibility of a body could be supposed to be exhausted, the 
products of its division had become invisible to us, and we had no test by which 
to tell when the atoms of a substance had been attained to. Both of these diffi- 
culties, according to WoLLasTon, were taken out of the way, by the mode in which 
Nature made the experiment. A dividing force co-ordinate with the divisibility 
on which it took effect—finite, if it were finite, infinite, if it were infinite—was 
brought into play. The result of this division, moreover, could be ascertained, 
could, in truth, literally be seen; for it did not take place in a vacuum, but in a 
space containing bodies, each of which would infallibly indicate the extension of a 
self-dividing medium at least to itself; and as that, if it were infinitely divisible, 
must reach to them all in its progress towards infinite division, should it certainly 

