Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/482

474 from all previous experience, and the inference from all experimental work to that date, seemed entirely obvious. But, so far as the writer is aware, this expression of the 'Law of Substance,' thus enunciated in August, 1878, is unanticipated. It was then stated as follows:

"The facts revealed by the researches of Rumford, Davy and Joule have been grouped and systematically united by Rankine, Thomson, Clausius and other scarcely less eminent men and the science of thermodynamics, which has been thus created, has been applied and put to the proof by Hirn and other distinguished engineers of our own time. Finally, it has now become evident that this last is but another branch of the universal science of energetics, which governs all effective forces in all departments of science. The man is still to be found who is to combine all the facts of this latest and most comprehensive of all sciences into one consistent and symmetrical whole and to illustrate its applications in all methods of exhibition of kinetic energy.

"The grand principle which we are just beginning to indistinctly perceive, and to recognize as underlying every branch of knowledge and as forming the foundation of all positive science, seems, when stated, to be simply an axiom. The Scriptural declaration that the world shall endure until its Maker shall decree its destruction by Omnipotence is but a statement of a principle which is more and more generally admitted as a scientific truth, viz.:

"The two products of creation, matter and force, and the fruit of their union, energy, are indestructible.

"The grand underlying basis of all science is found in the principle:

"All that has been created by infinite power—matter and its attribute, force, and all energy—is indestructible by finite power and shall continue to exist, so long as the hand of the Creator is withheld from its destruction."

"This 'Law of Substance,' as Haeckel proposes to call it, the writer then stated, has "been admitted almost from the time of Lavoisier, so far as it affects matter; it has been admitted as applicable to physical energies since the doctrine of the correlation of forces and of the persistence of energy became accepted by men of science and we are gradually progressing toward the establishment of a Law of Persistence of all Existence, whether of matter, of force and energy, or of organic vitality, and perhaps even to its extension until it includes intellectual and soul-life."