292 PROFESSOR LIONEL S. BEALE^ P.R.C.P.^ F.R.S., ON THE 



1)y the failure of any philosopher of genius enough to invent an 

 accepted solution of the rising of sap in trees, was aggravated by 

 the rejection of mere capillary attraction to account for it, as it 

 was for a time thought to do. And there are the heavy heads of 

 such things as sunflowers to increase the puzzle. Indeed, our 

 oldest law called gravity has not got beyond the region of universal 

 fact — a totally different thing from any prime cause of it. Weight 

 seems so natural that we are apt to forget that Newton only proved 

 it as a fact, and all sul)sequent experience has only confirmed it as an 

 universal law. Few people reflect what would be the condition of a 

 world, and still more, of a universe without it, in which nothing 

 would stand firm without bonds of some kind. Or you may realize it 

 by simply throwing a few corks on to a large basin full of water, out 

 of contact with and not very near each other, which will soon settle 

 for themselves to join each other and the basin. And now the general 

 puzzle is perhaps increased by the gradual reduction and at last aboli- 

 tion of any solid atoms, which are dismissed for mere "emanations" 

 of undemonstrable vibrating entities, as both electricity and light 

 are at last pronounced to be. Even a watch main-spring only does 

 its work by cohesion (which is only attraction completed) of its 

 particles in the old popular sense of the banished atoms. All the 

 chemical affinities too, are only attractions from no known or yet 

 imagined prime cause, except the one called (in banished language) 

 creation, and maintenance by an omnipotent and omnipresent force 

 and will, which plainly foresaw what behaviour it would cause. The 

 famous Tyndalic dogma of a promise and potency of life to dead 

 matter is transparent nonsense, invented to conceal ignorance by 

 fine words. All these forces are quite as inconceivable without a 

 prime cause as the entity called life, which is only the power to 

 attract and "assimilate" the air and water and other materials 

 for repairing decay or destruction — or, the knowledge and power to 

 lay eggs and all other seeds, which in their turn grow up to 

 imitate their parents and begin the same course again ad infinitum. 

 The head of the Birmingham University, Sir Oliver Lodge, quoted 

 Aristotle's knowledge of such things as a reason for sticking to 

 Greek learning, which really told us nothing. And he did not 

 answer any of the above questions, which must have been some- 

 where in the mind of such a contemptuous philosopher as he 

 appeared in the aforesaid great diffusion of universal knowledge, 



