Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/276

262 be what is called crystalline fracture. These crystals are, in fact, everywhere. If you break a sugar-loaf, you find the surface of fracture to be composed of small, shining, crystalline surfaces. In the fracture of cast-iron you notice the same thing; and next to his great object of squeezing out the entangled gas from his molten metal, another object of your celebrated townsman, Sir Joseph Whitworth, when he subsequently kneads his masses of white-hot iron as if they were so much dough, is to abolish this crystalline structure. The shining surfaces observed in the case of crystalline fracture are surfaces of weak cohesion; and, when you come to examine large and well-developed crystals, you soon learn why they are so. I try the crystal of sugar referred to at the beginning of this lecture in various directions with the edge of my knife, and find it obdurate; but I at length come upon a direction in which it splits clearly before the knife, revealing two shining surfaces of cleavage. Such surfaces are seen when you break cast-iron, and the metal is strengthened by their abolition. Other crystals split far more easily than the sugar.

In the course of scientific investigation, then, as I have tried to impress upon you, we make continual incursions from a physical world where we observe facts, into a super or sub-physical world, where the facts elude all observation, and we are thrown back upon the picturing power of the mind. By the agreement or disagreement of our picture with subsequent observation, it must stand or fall. If it represent a reality, it abides with us; if not, it fades like an unfixed photograph in the presence of subsequent light. Let me illustrate this. You know how very easy it is to cleave slate-rock. You know that Snowdon, Honister Crag, and other hills of Wales and Cumberland, may be thus cloven from crown to base. How was the cleavage produced? By simple bedding or stratification, you may answer. But the answer would not be correct; for, as Henslow and Sedgwick showed, the cleavage often cuts the bedding at a high angle. Well, here, as in other cases, the mind, endeavoring to find a cause, passed from the world of fact to the world of imagination, and it was assumed that slaty cleavage, like crystalline cleavage, was produced by polar forces. And, indeed, an interesting experiment of Mr. Justice Grove could be called upon to support this view. I have here, in a cylinder with glass ends, a fine magnetic mud, consisting of small particles of oxide of iron suspended in water. You can render those suspended particles polar by sending round the cylinder an electric current; and their subsequent action may be rendered evident. At present they are promiscuously strewed in the liquid. But the moment the current passes they all set their lengths parallel to a common direction. Before the current passes, the strongest beam of light can hardly struggle through the turbid medium. But, the moment it passes, light is seen to flash out upon the screen. Now, if you imagine the mud of slate-rocks to have been thus acted on, so as to place its particles with