I contend that man's body is an electric machine or organism, and electricity is its vital force and governing power, and all sickness is caused by the electrical derangement of the bodily organism. Electricity is the force which organized the body machine, which runs the body machine, and whose loss or deficiency cripples and finally destroys it.
Sickness is the impairment of some of the parts or functions of the body by reason of its failure to get its necessary and natural supply of electrical energy. This may be caused by an injury to some of its parts or by lack of proper air, food and nutrition containing the electric properties required. For air is an electric element from the life-giving sun, and vegetable food is the embalmed rays of the sun, and animal food is vegetable food embalmed in animal organism and brought one step nearer to electrical digestion, and both air and nutriment are necessary to supply vital electricity to the living organism. And while man can live without food forty days, he cannot live without air four minutes. The great force and power which run the human or animal machine is the vitalizing air we breathe, the electric atmosphere in which "we live, move and have our being." It is as much a substance as the water in which the fish swim, though it is transparent to light, while water is only partially so.
The lungs are the great electric reservoirs of the body and take the electric current of the sun from the atmosphere as constantly and naturally as the electric wire takes the current from the battery or the dynamo.
Then it imparts electric energy to the blood and sends it as an electric current and fluid coursing through every part of the body, producing vitalizing life and growth, causing the heart valves to beat and pump with marvelous power, the pulse to throb, and the whole machine to pulsate, thrill and whir with electric life and energy.
Flammarion says three-fourths of a man's life energy and nourishment comes from the air. And Nicola Tesla says the time may come when man may learn to live on air alone, as do some kinds of vegetable and animal organisms. Man in time may learn to so mix the elements of the atmosphere to supply the needs of the body, that he may, by breathing it into his lungs, obtain all the essential elements to preserve its life and organism.
The oxygen of the air keeps alive the fire of physical life, and the body may be compared to a flame fed unceasingly by electric fire from the sun and atmosphere, according to the laws of electric combustion. The want of oxygen or this electric energy from the air extinguishes the flame of life as it extinguishes the flame of a lamp.
The blood could not course through the veins with such marvelous speed if it were not for the electric energy imparted to it in the electric reservoir of the lungs; the heart valves could not throb with such wonderful force or the pulse keep its steady, unceasing beat but for the electric power imparted by the wireless electricity of the air.
Besides, the electricity of the air passes through and through the pores of the body at every point, giving additional life and force, and every angle of the body draws electricity like the point of a lightning rod, and the legs, the arms, the toes and the fingers with the space between them, constitute horseshoe magnets of great efficiency.
A man's strength and endurance is measured by the electric atmosphere he draws into his lungs and the fuel or food he takes into his stomach or boiler. A man's stomach bears a similar relation to the body that the boiler and furnace does to the machine, and should be treated in very much the same way. It should receive only the fuel necessary to its usefulness, and the ashes and debris should be cleaned out every morning before building a fresh fire, as is done with every well kept furnace. The lungs take in pure electricity from the air, while the stomach takes in compound electric elements, vegetable and animal, and converts them by the electric process of digestion and assimilation into blood and bone, nerves and tissue, and the two functions give vitality and growth to the whole body.
But the electric and controlling center of the bodily machine is the electric dynamo of the brain, to which is attached the spinal column with its nerve branches reaching out to all parts of the body, along which, as on connecting wires, the brain telegraphs its wish and will and governs the whole organism. Here the mind or soul dominates the brain and the brain dynamo dominates and controls the body. Through all the vicissitudes of life, until the final dissolution of the body, the telegrams from the brain running along the wires of the nerves control the muscles, the movements and all the varied utilities of the body. In other words, the mind controls the electricity of the brain, and the electricity of the brain controls the body.
If you cut a nerve or obstruct the electric current, you cut off the electric control of the brain, and there is paralysis in the part of the body where the electric wires are disconnected. Consumption is a disease caused by a failure of the lungs to draw sufficient electricity from the air to supply the normal needs of the body. For lack of this electric energy the whole system becomes enfeebled and finally dissolved. Indigestion is a failure of the stomach to supply the necessary electric energy to assimilate the food. And all sickness, aches and pains are nature crying for electric energy necessary for her to fulfill her natural offices and functions.
Dr. Jacques Loeb, of the Chicago University, announced on February 22nd, 1903, that he had discovered that muscular and nervous diseases, such as St. Vitus' dance, paralysis, agitatus, locomotor ataxia and sleeplessness, can be cured by administering calcium salts because of their electrical effects.
He says the presence of calcium salts in the muscles prevents their twitching; that practically all nervous disease are caused by the absence of the calcium, and "therefore to restore normal conditions and effect a cure a dose of calcium salts should be administered for its electrical effects upon the parts affected."
In recent years many persons have been restored to health and strength by the direct use of electric currents, and many diseases have been cured by electric appliances.
The necessity for an ample supply of electricity, both positive and negative, to sustain and preserve the life of the bodily machine is now acknowledged by all thinking scientists.
We have seen how different kinds of medicine, by furnishing the positive or negative molecules needed by the body, restore the natural equilibrium and preserve life and health, and how the failure to obtain these needed electrical supplies of life-giving energy, either by food or medicine, results in disease and death. We have seen how toxic and varied poisons have their antidotes in opposite electrical elements and molecules, and how stimulants excite and opiates quiet the electric energy of the body, and it is unnecessary to dwell longer on this subject. The fact that all sickness and death is caused by the electrical derangement of the body I think is now so clearly proven and so generally accepted, that detail and extended argument is unnecessary.
To show that electricity builds up the body. Even at this late period in the world's history there are instances of nature returning to her primitive electric crystalline process even to the extent of converting man's body into stone. Four recent cases are reported in the medical records of man's flesh gradually turning to stone. One case is reported from North Judson, Indiana, where Eli Green is turning to stone. His muscles, skin and flesh are gradually becoming as hard as the bones of his framework. To the touch he is dead. Only the feeble action of heart, lungs and stomach and a fertile and active mind give evidence that there is any life in him whatever.
The physicians declare he is afflicted with a disease that runs its course in seven years; not a day more or less. Green has already dragged out his existence over four of these years; only three of his short span of life remain.
There is a similar case reported of Miss Stella Ewing, the ossified woman of Rome, New York, and one from Sydney, Australia, where Jacques Moritz was afflicted with the same terrible malady. Eight years ago Moritz was seized with sickness that baffled every effort by the physicians to relieve it. From the patient's feet a numbness began to creep upward. That was the first sign of the disease. The numbness steadily ascended, and seven years from the day the malady first displayed itself the sickness had eaten its way into the patient's brain and had hardened it into stone exactly as it had hardened the muscles, flesh and skin of his body. Then death relieved the sufferer. There are several recent cases of a similar kind just reported in the newspapers.
This shows how easily nature can go back to her primitive electric process and in the crystalline formations resume her first step in world building. And humanity is not entirely free from an occasional freak of nature in thus returning to her first processes of electric growth.
Electricity teaches there is no death or need of a resurrection. That which lived never dies.
Electricity demonstrates the resurrection not of the physical body, but rather the continued existence of the real body, which is the electrical and spiritual body. Electricity proves there is no death. I believe man has three bodies—first, the physical body, or organic aggregation of atoms; second, the invisible electric body, which weaves and organizes the atomic body, sometimes called the astral body; and third, the real man, the spiritual body or soul, which controls the atomic body by means of the electric body. These constitute one perfect organism, and in normal health and condition it is under the almost perfect control of the mind or spiritual body, which sends forth its behest through the electric energy of the brain, which is the seat of power having charge of the electric and atomic body.
Death is the separation of the physical and spiritual bodies. The physical body goes into the grave and dissolves back into its natural elements. It fertilizes the soil and appears again in grass and tree and shrub, and the cattle eat it, and men eat the cattle, and its molecules enter again into other bodies.
But there is no resurrection for the physical body; it never comes out of the grave in organic form. The spiritual and electric bodies never die, never go into the grave. This is the true resurrection—the life everlasting. It is the invisible and secondary form which does not die, cannot die, and when once formed is as eternal as the stars.
The spiritual body and the electric form which surrounds it are incorruptible and start on their journey of endless existence together, never to be separated or destroyed.
Matter in its elemental form is invisible and eternal; electricity and spirit are invisible and eternal. Thus when the real man throws off his overcoat of atoms and steps out of this "mortal coil," he is free from the limitations of matter and can command the electric energy to go where destiny points and draws him, which is to the electric and spiritual center of our planetary system, the self-luminous and perfected world, the all-life-giving sun.
The oxygen of the air keeps alive the fire of physical life, and the body may be compared to a flame being fed unceasingly according to the laws of combustion. A want of oxygen extinguishes the flame of life as it extinguishes the flame of a lamp.
It is said a human being dies every second. In ten thousand years, two hundred thousand millions of human bodies have been formed by means of respiration and alimentation from the earth and atmosphere, and have returned to them again. They have enriched the earth and entered again into atmospheric circulation.
The earth is to-day formed in part of the myriads of brains which have thought and organisms which have lived. We walk over our ancestors as those who come after us will walk over us. It would be difficult to take a step upon the planet without walking over the remains of the dead, or to eat or drink without reabsorbing what has been eaten and drank a thousand times before, or to breathe without using the same air already many times used by the dead.
But this is not all there is of humanity. All the souls that have lived still exist. Souls are the seed of terrestrial population. We have no reason to affirm that man is formed solely of material atoms and that the faculty of thinking is only a property of his organization. This is the mistake of the one-sided physicist. When we analyze matter we find everywhere the invisible atom. Matter disappears like smoke in the atmosphere.
Our bodies at death gradually disappear in the same way. If our eyes had power to see the reality of things they would look through walls formed of separate molecules, through seemingly solid bodies, which are atomic vortices. It is with the eye of the spirit that we must see. We cannot trust to the sole testimony of our senses. There are as many stars above our head in the daytime as at night.
Nature knows neither astronomy, physics nor chemistry; these are subjective methods of study. All things are one—the infinitely great and the infinitely small. Stars and atoms are as one.
"To speak with exactness," says Flammarion, "solidity does not exist. A heavy ball of iron is composed of atoms which do not touch each other; its apparent solidity is pure illusion. In scientific analysis it is a cloud of gnats like those that hover in the air at twilight. Heat this ball which seems so solid and it will flow like water; heat it still more, it will evaporate into invisible space without changing its nature. It will always continue to be iron. In a house, its walls, floors, carpets and furniture are composed of molecules which do not touch each other. And these molecules which constitute all matter revolve around each other."
It is the same thing with our bodies. They are composed of molecules perpetually rotating around each other, like a flame, constantly consuming and constantly renewing itself. It is like a river on whose banks we sit and fancy we see the same water flowing past, but the current renews each drop perpetually.
Each globule of our blood is a miniature world, and we have five million in the fraction of a cubic inch, flowing incessantly through our arteries, flesh and brain, rushing in a vortex of life, as rapid relatively as that of the celestial bodies, and continually renewing the molecules of our heart, brain, eyes, nerves and flesh, and every atom of our bodily organism. And this so rapidly that in a few months our body is entirely reconstructed. Electricity, the right hand of Deity, does all this and sustains the earth, the sun and stars of the universe in infinite space. That which gives man his organism is not his material part; it is vital, invisible, electric force, and mental power. The body disintegrates all at once after death, as it disintegrates slowly, renewing itself perpetually, during life.
In the future there will be no fearful apprehension that the coal deposits of the world will be exhausted. The waters that now run to waste, the ever moving tides of the restless sea, the swift wings of the unused winds that sweep through the tides of the atmosphere will be harnessed to the car of human progress, and furnish all the energy needed to supply the vast activities of the world.
The concentrated heating power, latent in every sunbeam, and the combustible gases hidden in every drop of water will be supplemental sources of boundless energy for all ages on this wonderful magnetic planet. All sickness and ailments of the body are the result of the derangement of the electricity of the body, for which there is a remedy.
The art of longevity will be restored to the human race by supplying the electric energy necessary to maintain its growth and vigor, renew its wasted tissue and preserve its organic power. Then the age of Methuselah may come again in longevity, and the centenarian be in the boyhood of his race. Man will eat less, enjoy more, and get a thousand-fold more pleasure out of life, and be better prepared for his swift translation to the celestial cities of the sun.
In the future he may not eat eleven hundred meals per annum, but a few mouthfuls of concentrated food daily and an electric supply attachment adjusted to his body during sleeping hours may renew and rejuvenate his electric organism. It may be that in the future every residence will contain a chamber supplied with air and gases containing all the elements of the body so adjusted as to give it continual life and vigor by merely breathing in its life-giving elements a few hours each day. All these things are possible.
Then there will be light and refreshing work of a few hours daily—no real toil or labor—for the electric devices and pliable machinery, subject to the will of man and the electric button, will do the work of the world. Then the soul will be paramount and soar above the grosser appetites and passions to gather celestial joys in the spirit realm of earth's diviner life.
This is pre-eminently the age of mind and invisible forces, as the past century was the age of matter. Francis Grierson says: "So far as we know, electricity is the soul of form. What we call brain waves have an analogy to electric waves. We are being ruled by the seemingly impossible, and the most successful inventors of the present day would have passed for madmen twenty years ago. The so-called dreamers are now the men of action who have proven their power and competence, and thinking people turn to them for more miracles of discovery and invention. The day is not far distant when science of the mind will treat material science as a plaything, and the psychic power of intellect will kill Mammon like the stroke of an electric bolt, and brute power will succumb to soul force. The thinkers of to-day are as far removed from the thinkers of 1870 as electricity is from steam. We know steam is a crude and clumsy thing compared with electricity, and to-morrow we shall awake to the fact that mind is just as superior to the crude electric current."
One of the strong desires of mankind is a long life with a cheerful, vigorous old age. This may be obtained by supplying the necessary electrical energy either in proper food, or by a direct supply of electricity. This will prevent the hardening of the cellular tissues which produces the decrepitude of old age, and help to bless and lengthen human life.
With the divine powers of mind and electricity working for man the millennium of a long life and happiness will soon arrive.
I contend there is no light, heat or physical life except in the magnetic atmosphere of suns and planets. That only in this marvelous electric belt which surrounds the earth, sun and planets is light, heat and life evolved, for there alone is it needed for animal and vegetable life.
There is neither light, heat nor physical life in space. Physical life cannot exist in the cold, dark ether of space, and without life, light and heat would be not only useless, but as both are sensations of physical organisms they could have no existence whatever. They only exist as sensations caused by electric currents passing either to or through organic bodies. Where those organic bodies do not exist light and heat do not exist, for nature does no useless, nugatory things.
No physical life can be evolved or exist, except in the electric atmosphere of suns and planets where the life-giving electric currents meet and exert their power, and then only by drawing that life as an electric current from the sun constantly into the lungs every minute. In this way only is life and growth generated and all physical organisms created and continued in existence.
Thus all life is preserved and renewed by drawing the wireless electricity from the air just as the electric wire takes it from the dynamo. The vital portion of the air we draw into the electric reservoir of our lungs is simply our daily life drawn each day from the life-giving sun. This life and all that exist on earth or planets could not come from a burning globe or a molten sun. It is a superlative absurdity to think so.
Light, heat and life are the products of electric energy, which is only called into existence by the contact of positive and negative electricity in nature's chosen medium—the atmospheric environment of suns, planets and their satellites. This is nature's chosen theatre for animal and vegetable life. There is no reason or necessity for light, heat or animal and vegetable life elsewhere in the universe.
Here upon the surface of suns and planets are the mighty and varied currents of electric power and magnetic force, weaving forms and substance from invisible atoms and molecules, under the laws of electric attraction and organic affinity. In the economy of nature there are no wasted energies, or useless activities. Light, heat and physical life in space or transparent ether would be useless and nugatory; therefore nature ignores such folly in all her fruitful processes.
There may be reflected light, or a fluorescent glow, as in the tail of a comet or in the nebula of frigid space, but nothing we can truly call either heat or light can be evolved outside of the atmospheric sheet surrounding and penetrating the surface of suns, planets and satellites.
We walk on the surface of a revolving magnet and dynamo more perfect in measureless power and efficiency than any man has ever invented or dreamed of, and it generates the power which makes light, heat and life in its own electric environment, where all things "live, move and have their being." It does not get light and heat from the sun; it gets electric currents with which it manufactures light and heat.
Prof. Richard Proctor says: "Profs. Bond and Zollner calculated that Jupiter sends forth more light than he receives from the sun," and he concludes that, "if this be true, Jupiter must be partially self-luminous and shines in part by his own light."
This sustains my position that there is no such thing as "borrowed light from the sun," any more than borrowed heat from the sun. There are currents of electricity from the sun which burst into light and heat on the earth and planets when they come in contact with their opposite electricity.
But each globe in space evolves its own light and heat in its own environing atmosphere. If Jupiter shines by its own light, then the earth and planets all shine by their own light, the sun furnishing the electric power to enable them to do so. I think our moon is no exception. It evolves the mild silvery light it displays in our midnight skies from its own attenuated atmosphere, but displays it, like the planets, only on the side exposed to the direct rays of the sun. The greater and denser parts of the moon's atmosphere is in the deep and numerous cavities of its torn and rugged volcanic surface. All planets and satellites shine by the light evolved in their own atmosphere.
I contend that no reliance can be placed in the spectroscopic evidence of heat in the sun, or any distant globe. This ought to be apparent when all light and heat rays can only be translated into photography as a picture evolved in our own atmosphere. What we see are the electric colors in the atmosphere of a distant sun or planet.
The spectroscope simply photographs the colors of the elements in solution composing the atmosphere, just as we photograph the rich colors of a glowing sunset or a gorgeous rainbow. The evidence of the spectroscope as to heat has been greatly exaggerated and overestimated by the scientists, for it can give no evidence of heat. An astronomer standing on the moon and examining our gorgeous, glowing, crimson sunsets or aurora through a spectroscope would declare our earth was a blazing ball of fire. It would seem so to him, and he would have just as strong evidence as our astronomers have that the sun is hot or a ball of fire. Our astronomers look at the brilliant colors of the sun's aurora and make the same mistake.
All the astronomers admit the truth of Prof. Proctor's statement—that "the heat-giving power of a star is not proportional to the amount of light it emits." I ask why? And the answer is very plain: Because the stars and suns have no excessive heat and never had. Recent facts prove the sun is not hot. Prof. C. G. Abbott of the Smithsonian Institute, in his observations on the sun's eclipse on May 28th, 1900, says in his report: "My experiments showed the corona of the sun was actually cooler than the gray card which had been used at the room temperature."
What our astronomers have taken for fire and evidences of heat is the rich and glowing rainbow colors of the outer atmosphere of the sun, produced by infinitesimal atoms of the different metals and substances of the sun floating in solution in its brilliant aurora, just as the elements of the earth float in solution in our gorgeous sunsets. The sun having a larger surplus of electricity than the earth is thereby enabled to extend its vast aurora from the equator to the poles, and this gives continuous, varied and beautiful light, with no darkness to its celestial inhabitants. But the earth, lacking a sufficient surplus of electricity to extend its aurora from the equator to the poles, must content itself by displaying its brilliant light and beauty near its poles, only occasionally extending it half way to the equator. The fact that the earth creates its own aurora shows it manufactures its own light. Every flash of lightning in our midnight sky, every blazing meteor in our atmosphere, prove the earth and planets evolve their own light and heat.
I agree with Prof. Proctor, when he says: "I adopt the principle of Sir William Herschell that analogy is the chief and the best guide for the student of astronomy. General resemblance of structure indicates a general resemblance in the purpose which the celestial bodies are intended to subserve." And I contend that all or nearly all suns and planets are alike in structure and in substance, and are vast inhabited worlds, governed by the same laws, controlled by the same electric energy, and possessing varied types of vegetable, animal and intellectual creations similar to our earth.
It is a universal law of nature that wherever great electric power is conferred there are creations and results commensurate with that power.
Prof. Garrett P. Serviss, in the New York Journal, July 24th, 1901, predicted we would have four years of excessive heat on account of the dark spots on the sun, and many other scientists agreed with him. He said: "The earth is a satellite of a variable star. The source of terrible heat is directly in the sun and due to an extraordinary increase in its effective radiation. The periodic sunspot has thrown open the furnace door and sent forth the destroying blast which will continue for four years."
I undertook to answer him and contended that the sun is not variable in its heating power, and furnishes no more heating power to the earth at one time than another. That there is no increase in its effective radiation. That the sun does not furnish heat to the earth at all, and is not a thermal or heating engine as claimed by the scientists, but is an electric generator like the earth and does not need to be hot. That the sun furnishes the electric power and the earth heats itself. In other words, the sun furnishes powerful currents of electricity which come in contact with the earth's opposite electricity and the resistance of its atmosphere, and which are converted into light, heat and vital force down near the earth's surface.
The electric power furnished by the sun does not vary, but is measured by the attracting power of the earth as a vast magnet. Therefore all excess of heat is due to local causes and the uneven distribution of the sun's electric current on the earth's surface. This unequal distribution of sun currents, causing excessive heat in the west, was produced by light rainfall during the previous year, and the harvesting of large areas in Kansas, Missouri and adjacent territories, thus exposing a dry soil and preventing the accumulation of moisture necessary to form clouds. The succeeding summers justified my position and refuted the predictions of the learned professor and other scientists.
In mentioning these things I mean no disparagement to Prof. Serviss, whom I hold in high esteem, and only find fault with the old traditions which he upholds.
I am a friend to all scientists and regard them as earnest workers seeking the truth. But they follow accepted and antiquated authority too closely, and thus "the blind lead the blind." They are too often one-sided and impracticable. Men who study apes and beetles or atoms and gases all their lives are no judges of angel's faces or of the scope and design of the universe. Prof. Proctor's testimony that "nine-tenths of the astronomers employ their powers in making observations at great pains and labor which are not worth the paper on which they are recorded," is a plain statement of their tendency to be cranky and impracticable.
Some are so one-sided they think mathematics is everything. Mathematics in its place, like the miser, is good to count gains after they are acquired; but had man relied on mathematics he would have remained as ignorant of the fundamental truths of the universe as the Blackfoot Indians. Newton owed none of his discoveries to mathematics. When his constructive imagination formulated a theory he tried to bolster it up with mathematics. But it generally proved as delusive as did his calculation that the sun was 1,669,300 degrees hot.
The great boast of the mathematicians is that Le Verrier calculated where Neptune was before it was discovered by Galle at Berlin, but the fact is he missed it eight astronomical units or over seven hundred millions of miles, and said Neptune was not the planet he was looking for.
These are two average tests of mathematical calculations, and they are on a par with the mis-calculations of how much the sun must burn up annually under the so-called laws of gravity to supply the necessary heat to the earth and planets.
Imagination—constructive ideality—is the highest gift of Deity to man, and the only faculty that can reason from the known to the unknown and comprehend the wonders and grandeur of the universe.
I am not a practical chemist seeking the mysteries of nature in the laboratory, nor a professional scientist exploring the fields of original research; but, like La Place, Comte, Herbert Spencer and others, I formulate my theories and scientific hypotheses from the latest and best established facts of science as I see it. Science is only unified or systematic knowledge. Every fact is a scientific fact, and every truth is a scientific truth whether it pertains to so-called science or to religion or philosophy. Nature has no subdivisions of science, religion or philosophy, nor astronomy, chemistry or geology; but all things are a unity, constituting one harmonious universe; and he who separates science from religion or either from philosophy goes contrary to nature and divides the universe into fractions. As I am not a member of any scientific or religious association, I have no prejudices to overcome and seek the truth only, without fear, favor or undue predilections. Old traditions, fossilized theories and antiquated authority have little weight in my mind by the side of recent facts. But I am not an iconoclast, for I am more anxious to build up than to tear down.
The professional scientists may deem such students of nature as myself who trespass upon their chosen domain as amateurs. If so, it is a proud distinction. Amateurs have accomplished nearly all the great things in the world's history. Cromwell was a farmer, Hastings and Clive were clerks, Bismarck twice failed in his examination to become a lawyer, Washington was a surveyor and Franklin a printer, Herschell was a musician, Faraday a bookbinder, Scott a lawyer's clerk, Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning machine, was a barber; Spinoza a glass-blower, Herbert Spencer an engineer, Edison a newsboy, and Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, an ordinary workman; Lincoln was a railsplitter, Grant a tanner, Andrew Johnson a tailor, Andrew Jackson a saddler, Vanderbilt a ferryman, Rothschild a peddler, Krupp a blacksmith, Paul a tent-maker, and Christ a carpenter. The names of distinguished amateurs could be continued indefinitely, but space forbids.
As I have discussed this question elsewhere and touched on it in other chapters, extended discussion might cause repetition. Besides, this volume is not intended for detail or abtruse minutiæ, but for the statement of leading facts for the masses of intelligent people, who abhor technical terms and dry details. Many people find scientific books so dry and unpalatable, that, like the weary listener to the dry, dull sermon of the missionary, who said:
Doubtless he thought the hymnbook would be excellent dessert after such a dry meal; and some readers of scientific works find most any kind of dessert refreshing after partaking of the mental pabulum of dry statistics and technical terms to be found in many scientific works.
Our American Indian is never dull or unpoetic in his conception of the Universe. He sees God in the lightning, hears Him in the thunder; and according to him the "Milky Way" is the "Path of souls" leading to the villages in the sun. Along this pathway travel the spirits of the dead, and the brighter stars are "the campfires for the solitary journey to the land of the hereafter."
The Japanese term the Milky Way "the silver river of heaven." And the ancient Greeks considered the blue dome of the sky a crystal globe where dwelt the Olympian gods.
No science should be dry, and above all astronomy should lift us to empyrean heights where we may tread among the stars.
It is said facts are now being discovered and physical theories developed the ultimate result of which may be the explanation of the mysterious phenomena presented by the corona of the sun, the tails of comets, the aurora, terrestrial magnetism and its variations, nebulae and the zodiacal light. First, these facts are being established in connection with the pressure exerted by light which was pointed out by Maxwell and deduced by him from his electro-magnetic theory of light, which is, that when a pencil of light impinges perpendicularly on an opaque object, it produces a pressure on the surface of that object. This pressure is determined by the condition that if the object were set in motion with the velocity of light and the force against it kept up, the power to keep up the pressure would be equal to that carried by the ray of light.
Second, that particles smaller than atoms, called corpuscles or ions, are thrown off with high velocity from the intensely heated bodies. The sun, they claim, being such a body, it follows that such ions must be shot out from it. On this theory it is held that the explanation of a comet's tail is simple. The comet evaporates on the side next to the sun and, there being no pressure to hinder its expansion, it begins in flying off in all directions. It condenses into very minute particles which, by reason of the impulsion or pressure of the sun's rays, are thrown in the opposite direction from the sun.
My explanation has been, without all this detail, that it was the same law of electric repulsion which drove the comet off and prevented it falling into the sun, which also drove the comet's tail in an opposite direction from the sun.
This solution of the comet's tail does not solve the greater one of the repulsion of the comet itself. The pressure of the electric ions or corpuscles might force the tail away, but a greater electric force from the sun drives off the comet.
Prof. J. J. Thomson and Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist, have by experiments discovered and elaborated the manner and principles on which the ions or corpuscles operate. Arrhenius discovered that these ions were conductors of electricity and why, and Prof. Thomson discovered each corpuscle had the same electric charge as an ion of hydrogen, and that each must be smaller than a hydrogen atom—in fact only a thousandth part of it.
And here for the first time in the world's history science tells us there are bodies smaller than an atom—a thousand times smaller than an atom. We are told an atom is a thousand times smaller than the particles of invisible air we breath; now we have an ion a thousand times smaller than the atom. Surely the scientists have at last reached my theory of the fourth state of matter which I call the electro-magnetic. In fact these ions or corpuscles may be electricity itself or the atoms of electricity which science has at last discovered. And streams of these infinitesimal ions may constitute the swift and invisible currents of electricity which produce all natural phenomena. Prof. Blake, of the Kansas University, says: "Crookes called his cathode streams the fourth form of matter, but first to-day is such a state proven. Now, we must recognize at the beginning of this twentieth century a new form of matter. We have to deal with negatively charged particles so small that they have free paths of motion even among the atoms of substances."
As electric currents have free paths of motion even among the atoms of matter, these ions or corpuscles must be one form of electricity and must be both positive and negative, though the negative ions attract the most attention. I am glad to find science coming to my conclusions as to the fourth state of matter. But instead of calling it electric ions, electrons or Thomson corpuscles, it should be named electro-magnetic ether. It may be that science has at last discovered what electricity is, and that it consists of these infinitesimal corpuscles. Prof. Blake says: "These ions or corpuscles shatter into charged gases the molecules of gases and ionize the gases and make them conductors of electricity; they raise gases to incandescence and make them light-giving sources; they form nuclei about which matter will aggregate and condense; they seem to explain some of the most stupendous and perplexing problems in cosmic physics—such as the cause of the sun's corona, the spread of the comet's tail, the source of the meteors, the fantastic play of the auroras, whence the electric displays of our atmosphere, the after-glow of the setting sun, and the why of the zodiacal light."
He says the corpuscles seem to be solving the big problems of the heavens, and adds: "The corpuscles become luminous when impinged upon by electric waves; and waves of light, which are electro-magnetic disturbances, must move them, and light will be produced and be scattered in all directions as if reflected from minute particles of ordinary matter. This may account for the glow of the nebulae, and the zodiacal light. These corpuscles, being admitted into the moist air of our earth, form nuclei of condensation and drops are formed; and the growth of the high, fleecy clouds finds its beginning around these corpuscles. They also strike our equatorial region; there they are influenced by the earth's magnetic forces and deflected towards the poles, and near the poles they reach gases dense enough to become luminous by their impact and show the fantastic colorings of the aurora.
"Our atmosphere lies, then, like a great insulating sheet between conducting layers—the surface of the ocean and the upper air. In the ether of this intermediate insulating region electric waves may be set up to be propagated as signals in straight lines in all directions. When wireless telegraphy first reached out timidly into space, we all said its currents would leave the earth's surface within a short distance, for they went out from the earth's surface in straight lines; but as they extended farther and farther they seemed to bend around the earth and to follow its curvature. Hertz, who discovered the electric waves which Marconi now so successfully uses in wireless telegraphy, showed us in 1887 that conductors reflected these waves, and the ocean's surface sent them back when they impinged upon it.
"Now, with upper air layers proven conductors, the electric waves must be deflected from above as well and bent downward to follow the earth's curvature."
And thus electric signals, silent but all pervading, will before long circle our globe by their repeated deflections through this great speaking tube around the earth. The mysterious negative corpuscles, more minute than our smallest atoms, thus are themselves the very basis of the practicability of wireless telegraphy, our latest invention. Nay, more, may not these ions or corpuscles be atoms of electricity, and, being a thousand times smaller than atoms of matter, impregnate them with positive and negative force?
Inventors have been endeavoring to send messages over long distances without wires ever since the first tests were made in 1896. Only recently Marconi has succeeded in sending them across the Atlantic, two thousand miles through the air.
The distance to which messages may be transmitted and received depends on the amount of electric energy employed, the frequency of oscillation in the radiating system, the length of the electric waves emitted, the height of the perpendicular wires from the ground, the medium through which the waves are propagated, the sensitiveness of the coherer or receiver, and the precision with which the instruments are adjusted.
Long electric waves are radiated to greater distances than shorter ones, and much depends on the syntonic system, or tuning of the instrument, so as to communicate with any selected receiver to the exclusion of all others.
An electric generator supplies the source of electricity for operating an induction coil to transform the low pressure into an alternating current of high pressure. This charges the wire suspended from a mast and the wire leading to the earth to a sufficient potential to cause the opposite charges of electricity to rush together, thus forming a spark or disruptive discharge through a small air gap; as a result high potential currents surge to and fro through the wires hundreds of thousands of times per second.
These high potential currents radiate electric waves which are propagated as light waves and spread out in every direction. It is said the whole process of transmitting and receiving wireless messages is not unlike to the emission of light and its reception by the retina of the eye.
The reception of these waves is by means of a vertical wire similar to that used in transmitting, the difference being the wires at the terminals are connected with metal filings inclosed in a small glass tube called the coherer instead of the spark gap. The electric waves impinge on the elevated wire and are converted into electric oscillations, which act on the filings, and an auxiliary circuit registers the impulses on a ribbon of paper in readable Morse dots and dashes. The higher the vertical or mast wires and the greater the number of wires, the greater the wave length and the farther the distance transmitted.
Marconi in his first Atlantic tests employed kites and balloons to carry the vertical wire so that long electric waves could be obtained. Since then he has carried his wires on high masts, as at Poldhu, Glace Bay, and Wellfleet Station. The Marconi companies have equipped six stations in the United States, five in Hawaii, twenty in Great Britain, one in Belgium and one in France. There are eighteen ocean steamers, thirty-two British-men-of-war and several Italian and American warships which have Marconi installations. Marconi says: "There are thirty-five land stations, twenty-one liners and eighty-five warships equipped with Marconi apparatus. Land stations cost $1,000, and ship equipment, $700. Trans-Atlantic stations cost $100,000 each."
Wireless telegraphy is the most recent miracle of electricity, and shows it to be the cosmic energy of the universe. Science stumbled upon it. And in the same way, Sir Wm. Crookes, in a recent interview, says: "Science may some day stumble upon the soul. Men of science believe more than they can express, spiritually as well as physically." He will not prophesy, but said with ominous import: "If you had come to me a hundred years ago do you think I should have dreamed of foretelling the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it. I use it every day, but I don't understand it. Think of that little, stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating not only sounds, but words, and with the most delicate and illusive inflections of tone which separate one human voice from another."
Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt, says the Electrical Review, has invented a new apparatus which it is said will make a revolution in the method of sending wireless telegraph messages. The device consists of a glass globe about ten inches in diameter, having two tubes containing mercury sealed in the bottom of the vessel.
This apparatus acts, as a powerful and effective interrupter and takes the place of the spark gap now used in discharging the condensers for setting up electrical waves. It enables powerful, rapid and continuous oscillations to be set up in the antenna, or sending mast, used in transmitting wireless messages, and not only enables messages to be sent over very great distances with ease, but permits secrecy to be maintained, which heretofore has been impossible.
The operation of this device depends upon two new phenomena in physics which Mr. Hewitt has discovered in the course of his researches. The first is the resistance of the mercury in the apparatus to a passage of current until a high potential has been applied; the second is the disappearance of this resistance after this high voltage has been reached.
The effect of these two phenomena is to permit a condenser to be charged to a high potential and then, by the disappearance of the resistance of the interrupter, to discharge it very rapidly. The result of this action is to set up violent and rapid current impulses in the circuit containing the condenser, and thence in the sending wire. The current impulse, being very powerful, will enable messages to be sent to great distances, and as the number of oscillations per second can be controlled, this permits of selective signaling. The number of impulses can be made very high—above a million a second. The device is inexpensive and durable. It is considered a great contribution to wireless telegraphy and establishes it on a commercial basis, and selective signaling is solved and trans-Atlantic transmission will be easy.
Radium is a rare metal recently discovered, having remarkable qualities and very difficult to obtain. It is a constituent of pitchblende, which is found in many places, but only in a small way. So far all that has been procured has come from a mine in Cornwall. A ton of pitchblende carries about 15½ grains of radium and it is very difficult to extract. A grain is estimated to be worth $200,000 and a kilogram is worth about $2,000,000. There is only about one pound of radium in the world. It is estimated to be worth $1,000,000.
Radium was discovered by M. and Mme. Curie, in France, after they had familiarized themselves with the remarkable properties of uranium and polonium. Radium has many curious and inexplicable qualities. It continually emits heat and light without combustion, without chemical changes of any kind, and without any change in its bulk, appearance or molecular structure, which remains identical after many months.
It is so powerful in the energy it constantly hurls forth as to entail many dangers in handling it. Sir Wm. Crookes says in describing it: "Probably if half a kilogram were in a bottle on that table it would kill us all. It would most certainly destroy our sight and burn our skins to such an extent we could not survive. The smallest bit placed on one's arm would produce a blister it would take months to heal." It also emits electrons with a velocity so great that Prof. Crookes estimates "one gram is enough to lift the whole of the British navy to the top of Ben Nevis, and I am not quite certain that we could not throw in the French fleet as well."
It has such surprising properties that Lord Kelvin was moved to say of it that, "it threatens to overthrow the correlation of forces," which is the rock-ribbed, foundation postulate of science. It seems already to have unsettled the accepted theory of light, and after the experiments of the Russian scientists who are now investigating it, Profs. Mendelief, Yigooff and Borgruan, the result may give us new scientific theories and a new nomenclature.
Radium tends to confirm my electric theory of creation, it also seems to aid the Thomson corpuscles hypothesis, and will open the way to new and important discoveries.
My opinion from very brief thought on the subject is that radium is in its nature a form of electric energy solidified, and may be a bundle of Thomson corpuscles or electrons combined and solidified by some process not yet understood. It is in the nature of an electric dynamo, and draws its constant supply of electricity from the air. It is plain that it is an electric substance and manifestation, for, as Prof. Crookes says, "it emits electrons with a velocity so great one gram would lift the British navy to the top of a mountain, and he is even willing to throw in the French fleet." If he were not a great scientist, I should say he was exaggerating like an amateur. Radium is at present a great scientific puzzle. It seems to destroy the present theory of light and the conservation of energy and the so-called attraction of gravitation by reason of its marvelous energy and wonderful qualities.
But I stand with the scientists on the doctrine of the conservation of energy and the correlation of forces, and do not believe radium seriously threatens it, though Lord Kelvin had much reason to say so; and it is a puzzle yet unsolved as to how it maintains its energy without diminution of its force and bulk. I see but one explanation, and that is, that it renews itself constantly by drawing electric energy from the air, as a battery or dynamo draws it, and thus retains its marvelous power unimpaired.
I hold that energy, like matter, is a substance and can neither be created nor destroyed. It is impossible to create a molecule out of nothing or to reduce a single particle of energy to nothing. Energy, like matter, can be changed from one form to another or from one place to another, but all matter is one matter in its elemental form, and all energy is from one original energy, which I hold to be electricity. All matter is the aggregate manifestations of the invisible atom, and all energy is the varied manifestations of the one ultimate and only force in nature—electricity.
The transformation of energy, such as falling water, expanding steam, heat, light, vital force, and so-called gravitation, are all from the same electric elemental force, and this energy is without increase or decrease and is known as the conservation of energy. The definition given of electricity by Atkins in his work on electricity, which says, "it is a molecular mode of motion," is an absurdity, for motion is an effect produced by a cause, and all motion is caused by electric energy. And the mode of motion is simply the manner in which the law of electro-magnetism operates. Thus there may be an electric law yet undiscovered by which a substance like radium may draw electric energy from the air and keep its force and bulk unimpaired for many months, or perpetually.
But radium raises many other questions affecting the nature of light and heat, such as how such great heat and light can be condensed into so small a compass and evolved with such wonderful power.
Prospecting for valuable metals by electricity has been recently introduced in Wales with remarkable success. In the Cwnystwyth mines in Cornwall new and valuable deposits of ore and blende were located. These mines have been worked for over fifteen hundred years, and much of this time the search for additional lodes has been going on; yet this electrical device accomplished in a few hours what fifteen centuries of search failed to discover.
By the electric method of prospecting a current of high potential—30,000 volts or more—is employed to energize a piece of ground supposed to contain mineral. The current is taken from the terminals of the generating coil to metal rods or electrodes which are pushed an inch or two into the earth. From these distributers the lines of force spread out in both vertical and horizontal planes and may be made to extend over an area of several miles.
Their presence is detected by means of a delicate telephonic receiver connected with a second pair of metallic rods, which are stuck into the earth in any desired position. When the receiver is silent or gives only faint sounds, it indicates that the lines of force are deflected from their normal course. This reveals the presence of metallic masses in the earth, and, by moving the electrodes about, the position and area of an ore deposit may be determined with considerable accuracy. In new and unknown ground the operator would place his distributing electrodes about 200 yards apart, and remove his receiving instrument to a distance of half a mile or more. If his general knowledge of geological formation led him to believe that the metallic veins, if there were any, would run generally north and south, he would place his electrodes east and west, and if he found the electrical distribution normal he might conclude that the ground contained no mineral.
This remarkable electrical system for detecting the mineral deposits beneath the surface of the earth will doubtless be tested and perfected until man will be able without digging into the earth to ascertain the mineral deposits at any point beneath its surface. It may not always determine if they may be profitably worked, but in many mining regions it will be a blessing, and save much unprofitable work and sad disappointment.
Electrically heated cooking and laundry apparatus is now used in Germany and other countries. And there are farms on large German estates which are run by electricity. The Guednau farm in Eastern Prussia consists of 450 acres, and its dairy handles one thousand gallons of milk daily. It is lighted by electricity, has an electrical churn and feed-cutting machine, water-pumping apparatus, incandescent lamps, threshing and grist mills, saw mill, automatic plough and electrical agricultural machines, all run by charged batteries and a fifty-horse power stationery engine moving two dynamos. Thus farming is made attractive and free from drudgery, and is run like a machine by the electric current. Electricity is used not only to run some farms, but also to hasten and increase the growth of farm products by running wires a few inches beneath the surface to energize the soil.
The Commercial Cable Company announce that their ocean cable connections will be complete with Manila, in the Philippines, by the 4th of July of this year, 1903, and that on that day they will telegraph around the world in forty seconds. What a miracle of wonders! Fifty years ago the speediest communication from point to point was by swift horsemen making fifty miles a day. Now the round earth's antipodes is only forty seconds apart by reason of electric appliances.
So wonderful has been the growth of electrical appliances and utilities that Prof. H. B. Shaw, of the Missouri University, in a recent lecture, said: "In twenty years the electric light industry has developed from nothing to the manufacture of over 100,000 incandescent lamps per day. Ninety-five per cent. of the street railways in this country are electrically operated. Yet this industry was cradled in Kansas City, Mo., only about twenty years ago."
This was when I first had my attention drawn to electricity, for I saw the building of that line on East Fifth street, in that city. That and the lighting of the gas by an electric flash from a human body caused me to investigate electric phenomena and formulate the electric theory of creation.
Prof. Shaw said: "The latest development in long distance power is in California, where ten thousand horse power is transmitted two hundred miles from where it is generated with a loss of only ten per cent. of power in the line. Ten thousand horse power is sufficient to raise a million tons two inches per minute."
What a miracle that such power can pass along a wire no larger than a child's finger, and exert such force two hundred miles from where it is generated! Nothing but the invisible creative cosmic force of the universe could accomplish such a seeming miracle.
But some scientists are so irrational as to say this force is merely the pressure, twist or whirl of the ether, when it is plain that if the ether were as rigid as steel it could not exert such force and power. And as to it being a derivative force derived from the coal, wood or sun, it is plain it is the same force and the original, ultimate, creating evolving and only force in the physical universe.
There has been much labor and money expended in endeavoring to perfect a balloon or airship, which would be safe and could be directed through the air at will in any course desired. Electricity has been used as the steering power and aluminum, because of its light weight, for the frame-work. The French especially have given great attention to what they call the dirigible balloon, but no great amount of success has been achieved and, in my opinion, never will.
In the very nature of things, no safe airship can ever be built. It was not intended that man should travel or carry burdens through the upper regions of the air. First, because the law of the earth's electric attraction forbids it. Second, because the sudden and powerful wind and electric currents that pervade the upper regions of the atmosphere are sure to bring ruin and death, sooner or later, and no human power can prevent it.
The balloon or airship is only a dangerous toy which can be useful perhaps in times of war to spy out the enemy, but utterly useless otherwise, and which means death in a very short time to all who risk their lives in its treacherous power.
There have been two recent and striking examples of this in the case of the two distinguished experts in Paris who thought they had built airships that could overcome the powers of nature, and while proudly exhibiting them to their family and friends were hurled to a sudden and fearful death.
The many deaths and narrow escapes from these useless and dangerous toys make it almost certain that no sane man would risk his life in one of them, though there were a thousand at his command free of expense.
Of all the useless follies on which inventive genius and money have been expended, the airship is the worst, because if millions of the most perfect ones the imagination of man can conceive were built and offered free, no prudent man would risk his life or his goods in their treacherous care. The powers of nature, and what the ancients called the demons of the air, forbid that the airship should ever be anything more than a dangerous toy for reckless persons, who wish to jeopardize their lives.
Great efforts have been made, much money expended and many lives lost in futile attempts to find the North Pole, which when discovered may appear like any other ice field, mountain glacier, or snowdrift of the Arctic Circle. But the thirst for knowledge and the love of adventure and exploration where no financial reward can be expected is creditable to humanity, and shows that the love of knowledge is sometimes above that of sordid gain. The struggle for two centuries has been to reach the North Pole, and it has been approached as near as 700 miles; but recent reports indicate that conditions are more favorable for reaching the South Pole; and a French expedition outfitted this year for the North Pole have changed their destination to the South Pole. One or both poles are likely to be discovered in a few years.
There have been many scientific expeditions to various parts of our globe for astronomical observations. One recently sent to Chili from the Lick Observatory should command especial interest since its object is by the study of the southern stars to ascertain where the earth and the solar system is going. We know our sun system is moving swiftly towards the north, in the direction of the stars Vega or Alpha Lyra, at the rate of more than forty-three thousand miles an hour. Each year we are more than three hundred million miles nearer these stars, unless they also are in motion in the same direction. The southern stars have been studied much less than the northern stars, and the testimony of both is desired to determine the direction of the mysterious voyage of the sun and its family of worlds through the unexplored regions of space.
We have been watching the stars in front of us for many years, and will now give some attention to the stars in our rear to confirm or disprove many astronomical hypotheses.
It is like getting back to anti-Copernican times to have Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, in his flights of speculative astronomy, say that, "our solar system is central in the universe and that this earth of ours is probably the only planet on which humanity has been developed." In a recent article he undertakes to establish this ancient fallacy. It is very doubtful whether the universe has a general center, but if it has it should be plain to our learned astronomer that as our system is moving through space in a straight line at the rate of 420,000 miles per day it could not occupy a central position very long. The only means we have to judge of the inhabitability of other worlds is by analogy, which is the foundation of all scientific hypotheses. The likeness in form, substance and electric power of suns and planets to our own world leads to the natural conclusion that all suns and worlds are inhabitated. In fact any other assumption is contrary to all cosmological reasoning and all analogy to be found in universal nature. Nature nowhere bestows vast substance and power without commensurate results of life and growth, and it is reversing all the laws of reason, analogy and cosmic experience to hold to the contrary. We must give up this egotistic assumption that our little world is the only living world in this vast universe, or that it is only one of a few living worlds.
There are no dead worlds or planets or burning suns in this electric universe, and we are not "the only pebble on the boundless beach" of creative worlds. We have the same electric fire in our bodies that is in the sun, and it neither burns us nor causes us to shrink up annually, as the scientists say the sun does. It is not the consumer of life, but the giver of life, and the continual life energy of the universe.
During a recent eclipse of the moon, Prof. W. H. Pickering, of Harvard Observatory, ascertained that the bright spot around the crater Linne on the surface of the moon grows considerably larger when deprived of the heat of the sun. For many years it has been noticed that the Linne area has been gradually changing and many theories regarding the causes have been advanced.
Prof. Pickering is inclined to the belief that it is hoar frost or ice. This tends to confirm my theory that the moon has an atmosphere and some moisture which is mostly hidden in its perforated volcanic surface.
Alexander Young, an astronomer of Laport, Ind., announced on February 20th, 1903, that, "from observations made by him, he is confident that the sun is inhabited; that with his instruments he has seen on the sun's surface mountain sides with great and precipitous rocks which glow with prismatic colors, mingled with the greenness of perennial vegetation."
I was not expecting this scientific proof so soon, but I am satisfied that the inhabitants, the mountains and the perennial vegetation are there; and if he has succeeded in magnifying the rays of light from the vast openings in the sun's photosphere sufficiently he can and did see them.
I am a firm believer in the inhabitability of the sun, and that it is a perfected, self-luminous world—a world like our world, only vastly larger and more prolific in life and power. As it is the source of all life and power to the planets, it must be the creator of all life to its celestial inhabitants.
Profs. Proctor and Herschell seem to believe that most of the heavenly bodies are inhabited. Sir Wm. Herschell went so far as to contend for a time that the sun was inhabited or inhabitable because, he said, the heat of the sun was in its photosphere, which was far out in space and many miles from the sun's surface, and that there were cool clouds and layers of atmosphere, he thought, between the heat and the sun's surface which made the body of the sun cool enough for animal and vegetable life and human habitation. He changed his mind, however, in a few years and held the heat of the sun was too hot to allow anything in nature to keep such excessive heat from its surface, and besides, the law of the conservation of forces just coming into scientific prominence then forbid it.
Prof. Proctor, says: "I adopt the principle of Sir Wm. Herschell that analogy is the chief and the best guide for the student of astronomy. That general resemblance of structure indicates a general resemblance in the purpose which the celestial bodies are intended to subserve is evident when we compare the stars with our sun or with each other. Some time or other those worlds have been or will be the abode of intelligent creatures seems to be a fair conclusion from what we know of their structure."
Deity does no irrational things, nature is always logical and consistent, and where there is such vast resources of substance and power bestowed, as in our sun and the eighteen millions of suns of the universe, it was not for the purpose of making bonfires and blazing furnaces of them. But they were created for vaster, more perfect theatres of intelligent life and activities. Besides, burning them up could bestow no benefit on the planets; the heat could not reach them, and if it could it is only a sensation, and sensation cannot produce vegetable or animal life, or control the earth's motion.
One of the greatest of modern discoveries is that heat is not a substance but a sensation, produced by electric currents. So that eighteen millions to one hundred millions of suns do not need to be burning up to furnish electric currents to their planetary worlds. And our sun is not burning up thirty quintillions cubic feet of itself annually, and a hundred millions of suns many a thousand times larger than ours are not burning up a thousand times more of themselves, as the astronomers claim, and the whole thing is a great absurdity and superstition.