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Page 16
These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite
capacities and intensities of the ether. Matter is more forceful, as
it is less dense. Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate
resistance. Steam is rarer and more forceful. Gases suddenly born of
dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the
tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch.
Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented
by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it.
When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship
through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water
through it? Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol. Certainly the
vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond. To be
sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance. The speed of
light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in
space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass. If ether can so
readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could
appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut."
Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately.
In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house
provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and
ceilings, without wire connections. More than twenty years ago
Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty
miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites. Last
year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one
hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of
Mull, a distance of four and a half miles. Marconi, an Italian, has
sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the
London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill.
Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric
vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of
masonry. Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such
infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must. It has already
been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead
wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire
will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without
interference. What will not the more facile ether do?
Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and
knowledge not yet explored. They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn.
The full day is yet to shine.
Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse--afraid of the
unknown master. If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is
our Father, and that he has fitted up this house, out of his own
infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like him in wisdom and
power as well as in love.
OUR ENJOYMENT OF NATURE'S FORCES
We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the
exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle
but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men,
there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the
Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered
down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.
But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of
our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb
forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our
forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery
on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our
fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature
what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in
looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence
of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they
stood in the presence of God--and they do.
The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes
it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa
has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.
Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All
the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and
gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And
yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated,
molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the
whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.
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