Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/380

366 "their life has not an eternal principle as its center; at their death, all is at an end with them." According to Paracelsus, "All the elements have a soul and are living. . . . They are not inferior to man, but they differ from him in not having an immortal soul. They are the powers of Nature—that is, it is they that do what we usually attribute to Nature. We may call them beings, but they are not of the race of Adam." A similar doctrine is developed in Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled. The same method of conceiving of the production of physical phenomena has had defenders in the world of positive science, as in the doctrine of monads of Leibnitz; in the anatomical elements of Claude Bernard, who speaks of our bodies as being composed of millions, milliards of minute beings or living individuals of different species, of which those of the same species unite to constitute our tissues, while the tissues join to constitute our organs, and all react upon one another with a harmonious concurrence for a common end; and in Sir John Herschel, who wrote in the Fortnightly Review, in 1865, that all that has been attributed to atoms, their loves and hates, their attractions and repulsions, according to the primitive laws of their being, becomes intelligible only when we admit the presence of a mental quality in them. Modern scientific theories tend to assume the unity of matter, of a protyle, which forms all substances by different degrees of condensation. Some go still further, and assume that there is no matter in the ordinary sense of the word, but only force and energy. F. Hartman argues that we can change force into matter, and that is what takes place every instant in the human body, as well as in the vegetable and animal world, and we can change matter into force under like conditions. This etheric force, the base of all the others, is what Lord Lytton describes in his romance, The Future Race, as "vril." So these dreams are repeated—to receive, perhaps, possible verifications in future discoveries; and thus old follies may, as Beaumarchais says, in the Marriage of Figaro, become wisdom, "and the fictions of the ancients be transformed into pretty little truths."—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

to calculations by M. L. Niesten, all the asteroids known (now more than 300), if combined into one, would form a body not quite 514 miles in diameter, or less than one twentieth the diameter of the earth; and it would require 8,575 bodies like it to form a planet having the volume of the earth. The largest of the asteroids, Vesta, is 230 miles in diameter, and the smallest, Agatha, four miles and a half. As all of these bodies having considerable size have most probably been discovered, the estimate of the mass of the whole is not likely to be materially affected by the detection of new ones.