Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/294

280 vibration, all that we can conclude is, that whatever differences there are in their weights, and whatever differences there are in their degrees of vibration, these differences are too small to be found out by our present modes of measurement, and that is precisely all that we can conclude in every similar question of science.

Now, how does this apply to the question whether it is possible for molecules to have been evolved by natural processes? I do not understand, myself, how, even supposing that we knew that they were exactly alike, we could know from that, for certain, that they had not been evolved, because there is only one case of evolution that we know any thing at all about, and that we know very little about yet—that is the evolution of organized beings. The processes by which that evolution takes place are long, cumbrous, and wasteful processes of natural selection and hereditary descent. They are processes which act slowly, which take a great lapse of ages to produce their natural effects. But it seems to me quite possible to conceive, in our entire ignorance of the subject, that there may be other processes of evolution which result in a definite number of forms—those of the chemical elements—just as these processes of the evolution of organized beings have resulted in a greater number of forms. All that we know of the ether shows that its actions are of a rapidity very much exceeding any thing we know of the motions of visible matter. It is a possible thing, for example, that mechanical conditions should exist, according to which all bodies must be made of regular solids, that molecules should all have flat sides, and that these sides should all be of the same shape. I suppose it is just conceivable that it might be impossible for a molecule to exist with two of its faces different. In that case we know there would be just five shapes for a molecule to exist in, and these would be produced by process of evolution. Now, the forms of various matter that we know, and that chemists call elements, seem to be related one to another very much in that sort of way: that is, as if they rose out of mechanical conditions which only rendered it possible for a certain definite number of forms to exist, and which, whenever any molecule deviates slightly from one of these forms, would immediately operate to set it right again. I do not know at all—we have nothing definite to go upon—what the shape of a molecule is, or what is the nature of the vibration it undergoes, or what its condition is compared with the ether; and in our absolute ignorance it would be impossible to make any conception of the mode in which it grew up. When we know as much about the shape of a molecule as we do about the solar system, for example, we may be sure of its mode of evolution as we are of the way in which the solar system came about; but, in our present ignorance, all we have to do is to show that such experiments as we can make do not give us evidence that it is absolutely impossible for molecules of matter to have been evolved out of ether by natural processes.