universal and primordial ether which itself constitutes the all.
Questioned more closely as to his view of the particular forces which count most in the scheme of the universe thus constituted, he would put aside at once chemical affinity and cohesion, or the gravitation which shapes stars and suns, or heat on which organic life depends. All these he would class as the paltry residual effects, the by-products, the obiter dicta of those electrical powers so inconceivably potent, so unimaginably prodigious, lying stored and balanced, or moving with the speed of light, within the molecules themselves. Thus there are no such things as units of matter; there are only units of electricity. Matter does not exist, or, if that be too strange a proposition, then matter, he would say, is no other than a collection of negative and positive units of electricity, and the properties which differentiate one kind of matter from another originate in the electrical forces exerted by the positive and negative units grouped together in things.
But, if this be so, then, to come back to earth, the affair of human industry is, for one thing, to utilise, however infinitesimally, these boundless electrical resources, and to harness them with precaution to its own service. It scarcely pretends to do so at present on any general scale, or on anything like scientific lines. For instance, the most obviously available form of the energy of matter is the heat of the sun. On the electro-magnetic
