SUN FORCE AND EARTH FORCE. 
333 
Metcalfe himself, dwelling on tlie above-named phenomena 
and accounting for them by the unity of principle of action 
which has already been explained, sums up his argument in 
very clear terms, in a comment on the densities of various 
bodies. 
“ Hardness and softness, solidity and liquidity, are not 
essential conditions of bodies, but depend on the relative 
proportions of ethereal and ponderable matter of which they 
are composed. The most elastic gas may be reduced to the 
liquid form by the abstraction of caloric, and again converted 
into a firm solid, the particles of which would cling together 
with a force proportional to their augmented affinity for 
caloric. On the other hand, by adding a sufficient quantity of 
the same principle to the densest metals, their attraction for it 
is diminished when they are expanded into the gaseous state, 
and their cohesion is destroyed/ - ’ 
I shall not dwell at greater length on the unity of sun force 
and earth, which this theory implies. But I may add that out 
of it or out of the hypothesis of mere motion as force and of 
virtue without substance, we may gather as the nearest pos- 
sible approach to the truth, on this, the most complex and 
profound of all subjects, the following inferences : — 
(a.) Space inter- stellary, inter-planetary, inter-material, 
inter- organic, is not a vacuum, but is filled with a subtle fluid 
or gas, which for want of a better term we may call still, as 
the ancients did, Aith-Ur — Solar fire, AETHER. This fluid, 
unchangeable in composition, indestructible, invisible, pervades 
everything, and all matter ; the pebble in the running brook, 
the tree over-hanging, the man looking on, is charged with 
this ether in various degree : the pebble less than the tree, 
the tree less than the man. All the planet in like manner is 
so charged ! A world built up in ethereal fluid and moving 
through a sea of it. 
(b) The ether, whatever its nature, is from the sun and from 
the suns ; the suns are the generators of it, the store-houses 
of it, the diffusers of it. 
(c) Without the ether there could be no motion; without it 
particles 'of ponderable matter could not glide over each other ; 
without it there could be no impulse to excite those particles 
into action. 
( d ) Ether determines the constitution of bodies. Were 
there no ether, there could be no change of constitution of 
substance : water, for example, could only exist as a substance, 
compact and insoluble beyond any conception we could form 
of it. It could never even be ice, never fluid, never vapour, 
except for ether. 
( e ) Ether connects sun with planet, planet with planet, man 
