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62 vancing crest of the wave of discovery, industry will hold right on.

If we are to understand something of the degree in which, as the century proceeds, science will have enlarged its knowledge of matter, we have only to glance backward to its views of matter at the close of the eighteenth century, and compare them with the views which it entertains now. A man of science, asked at the earlier date as to the constitution of things, would have answered with confidence that there were all sorts of ponderable matter scattered through space, but all retaining their mass unchanged through every metamorphosis and all exercising action at a distance. Among these masses would move the two electrical fluids, and the corpuscular emanations known as light. Further, he would have described matter as possessed of primary qualities, such as shape and mass, and of secondary qualities, such as warmth and colour. Such, at the close of the eighteenth century, was the tenure on truth of the scientific man.

If a similar expert were to-day confronted with a similar question he would ridicule and reject out of hand every one of the above propositions. Proceeding to his own views he would declare his belief that matter is electricity. He would resolve matter into elementary atoms, these again into sub-atoms or monads, which last he would show to be not electrified atoms, but electricity itself. Asked further to define electricity, he would submit that it is but a knot, a kink, a convolution of that