Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/309

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The ethereal viscosity being excessively small, either very high velocities, or very long durations are required to produce appreciable ether drift. As Lagrange has demonstrated, there can be no surface of discontinuity in a perfect fluid, because such a surface implies a continuous generation of rotation in portions of a fluid of constant density. Conversely, if any discontinuity can be imposed upon the ether, it must be a viscous fluid. Any structures formed from a viscous fluid must eventually decay. The duration of the material phase may be enormous, but its ultimate transition is inevitable. The point I wish to make is that there is evidence of an absorption of light by the ether, and that there is also evidence of atomic disintegration. The two processes interlock into necessary and concomitant parts of a consistent whole. What I have tried to demonstrate is the existence of a phenomenon and its approximate law, without attempting a refinement which would be unwarranted at the present stage of the investigation.

In brief, we may conclude that space contains myriads of galaxies which would make the midnight sky one blaze of light, were it not for the absorption of light by the ether of space. This absorption can not be a selective scattering by gaseous molecules, because this would deplete the radiation of short wave-length unduly, and would redden the light of the more distant nebulæ, whereas no such change of color with distance is found. Neither can the absorption be due to the general absorption of radiation of every wave-length by coarser meteoritic dust, since the meteoritic material would in time become heated to incandescence, as Arrhenius has noted, and in this case also the entire heavens must glow. There remains, then, the supposition that the ether itself absorbs the radiation from the stars, and that in this fixation of energy, matter originates.

There is, I apprehend, a close analogy between the sequences of cosmogony and of geogeny. Upon the earth there are wide expanses of oceanic depths which have apparently remained such from the beginning of denudation. That remarkable property of saline solutions whereby suspended solid particles are quickly precipitated, causes the marginal deposition of those sediments brought to the sea by the rivers. The oceanic depths are the counterparts of the intergalactic spaces. In both, change progresses very slowly.

But around the borders of the continents, sediments accumulate in geosynclines which are self perpetuating. The increasing weight of the deposit deepens the depression, until after the accumulation has