Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/287

Rh magnetic field. I here lived amid the most complex operations of magnetism in its twofold aspect of an attractive and a repellent force. Iron was attracted by a magnet, bismuth was repelled, and the crystals operated on ranged themselves under these two heads. Faraday and Plücker had worked assiduously at the subject, and had invoked the aid of new forces to account for the phenomena. It was soon, however, found that the displacement, in a crystal, of an atom of the iron class by an atom of the bismuth class, without any change of crystalline form, produced a complete reversal of the phenomena. The lines through the crystal which were in the one case drawn toward the poles of the magnet, were driven in the other case from these poles. By such instances and the reasoning which they suggested, magne-crystallic action was proved to be due, not to the operation of new forces, but to the modification of the old ones by molecular arrangement. Whether diamagnetism, like magnetism, was a polar force, was in those days a subject of the most lively contention. It was finally proved to be so; and the most complicated cases of magne-crystallic action were immediately shown to be simple mechanical consequences of the principle of diamagnetic polarity. These early researches, which occupied in all five years of my life, and during which the molecular architecture of crystals was an incessant subject of mental contemplation, gave a tinge and bias to my subsequent scientific thought, and their influence is easily traced in my subsequent inquiries. For example, during nine long years of labor on the subject of radiation, heat and light were handled throughout by me, not as ends, but as instruments by the aid of which the mind might perchance lay hold upon the ultimate particles of matter.

Scientific progress depends on two factors which incessantly interact—the strengthening of the mind by exercise and the illumination of phenomena by knowledge. There seems no limit to the insight regarding physical processes which this interaction carries in its train. Through such insight we are enabled to enter and explore that subsensible world into which all natural phenomena strike their roots, and from which they derive nutrition. By it we are enabled to place before the mind's eye atoms and atomic motions which lie far beyond the range of the senses, and to apply to them reasoning as stringent as that applied by the mechanician to the motions and collisions of sensible masses. But, once committed to such conceptions, there is the risk of being led irresistibly beyond the bounds of inorganic Nature. Even in these early stages of scientific development I found myself more and more compelled to regard not only crystals, but organic structures, the body of man inclusive, as cases of molecular architecture, infinitely more complex, it is true, than those of inorganic Nature, but reducible, in the long-run, to the same mechanical laws. In ancient journals I find recorded ponderings and speculations relating to these subjects, and attempts made, by reference to magnetic and crystalline phenomena, to present some satisfactory image to the mind of the way in which plants and animals are