o the great Mysteries at once, and without any
further ado or the preliminary and usual preparations or training, the
F.R.S.'s could be miraculously endowed with the required sixth sense,
the Adepts fear the task would be profitless. The latter have given
quite enough, little though it may seem, for the purposes of a first
trial. The sequence of martyrs to the great universal truths has never
been once broken; and the long list of known and unknown sufferers,
headed with the name of Galileo, now closes with that of Zollner. Is the
world of science aware of the real cause of Zollner's premature death?
When the fourth dimension of space becomes a scientific reality like the
fourth state of matter, he may have a statue raised to him by grateful
posterity. But this will neither recall him to life, nor will it
obliterate the days and months of mental agony that harassed the soul of
this intuitional, far-seeing, modest genius, made even after his death
to receive the donkey's kick of misrepresentation and to be publicly
charged with lunacy.

Hitherto, astronomy could grope between light and darkness only with the
help of the uncertain guidance offered it by analogy. It has reduced to
fact and mathematical precision the physical motion and the paths of the
heavenly bodies, and--no more. So far, it has been unable to discover
with any approach to certainty the physical constitution of either sun,
stars, or even cometary matter. Of the latter, it seems to know no more
than was taught 5,000 years ago by the official astronomers of old
Chaldea and Egypt--namely, that it is vaporous, since it transmits the
rays of stars and planets without any sensible obstruction. But let the
modern chemist be asked to tell one whether this matter is in any way
connected with, or akin to, that of any of the gases he is acquainted
with; or again, to any of the solid elements of his chemistry. The
probable answer received will be very little calculated to solve the
world's perplexity; since, all hypotheses to the contrary
notwithstanding, cometary matter does not appear to possess even the
common law of adhesion or of chemical affinity. The reason for it is
very simple. And the truth ought long ago to have dawned upon the
experimentalists, since our little world (though so repeatedly visited
by the hairy and bearded travelers, enveloped in the evanescent veil of
their tails, and otherwise brought in contact with that matter) has
neither