Nay, when we come to possibilities, does not his own system give a queer one? If highly rarefied oxygen be vital power, more highly rarefied oxygen may be more vital and more powerful. Where is this to stop? Is it impossible that a finite quantity, rarefied ad infinitum, may be an Omnipotent? Perhaps the true Genesis, when written, will open with 'In the beginning was an imperial quart of oxygen at 60° of Fahrenheit, and the pressure of the atmosphere; and this oxygen was infinitely rarefied and this oxygen became God.' For myself, my aspirations as to this system are Manichæan. The quart of oxygen is the Ormuzd, or good principle; another quart, of hydrogen, is the Ahriman, or evil principle! My author says that his system explains Freewill and Immortality so obviously that it is difficult to read previous speculations with becoming gravity. My deduction explains the conflict of good and evil with such clearness that no one can henceforward read the New Testament with becoming reverence. The surgeon whom I have described is an early bud which will probably be nipped by the frost and wither on the ground but there is a good crop coming. Material pneuma is destined to high functions and man is to read by gas-light.
The solar system truly solved; demonstrating by the perfect harmony of the planets, founded on the four universal laws, the Sun to be an electrical space; and a source of every natural production displayed throughout the solar system. By James Hopkins. London, 1849, 8vo.
The author says:—
'I am satisfied that I have given the true laws constituting the Sun to be space; and I call upon those disposed to maintain the contrary, to give true laws showing him to be a body: until such can be satisfactorily established, I have an undoubted claim to the credit of my theory,—That the Sun is an Electric Space, fed and governed by the planets, which have the property of attracting heat from it and the means of supplying the necessary pabulum by their degenerated air driven off towards the central space—the wonderful alembic in which it becomes transmuted to the revivifying necessities of continuous action; and the central space or Sun being perfectly electric, has the counter property of repulsing the bodies that attract it. How wonderful a conception! How beautiful, how magnificent an arrangement!
'O Centre! O Space! Electric Space!'
1849. Joseph Ady is entitled to a place in this list of discoverers: his great fault, like that of some others, lay in pushing his method too far. He began by detecting unclaimed dividends,
