sture from their great height so lightly that seldom a
violet is crushed by the rudeness with which the stream descends.

Our conceptions of strength and endurance are so associated with
visible implements and mechanical arrangements that it is hard to
divorce them, and yet the stream of electric fire that splits an
ash is not a ponderable thing, and the way in which the lodestone
reaches the ten-pound weight and makes it jump is not perceptible.
You would think the man had pretty good molars that should gnaw a
spike like a stick of candy, but a bottle of innocent-looking
hydrogen-gas will chew up a piece of bar-iron as though it were
some favorite Cavendish.

The prominent lesson of science to men, therefore, is faith in the
intangible and invisible. Shall we talk of matter as the great
reality of the world, the prominent substance? It is nothing but
the battleground of terrific forces. Every particle of matter, the
chemists tell us, is strained up to its last degree of endurance.
The glistening bead of dew from which the daisy gently nurses its
strength, and which a sunbeam may dissipate, is the globular
compromise of antagonistic powers that would shake this building in
their unchained rage. And so every atom of matter is the slave of
imperious masters that never let it alone. It is nursed and
caressed, next bandied about, and soon cuffed and kicked by its
invisible overseers. Poor atoms! No abolition societies will ever
free them from their bondage, no colonization movement waft them to
any physical Liberia. For every particle of matter is bound by
eternal fealty to some spiritual lords, to be pinched by one and
squeezed by another and torn asunder by a third; now to be painted
by this and now blistered by that; now tormented with heat and soon
chilled with cold; hurried from the Arctic Circle to sweat at the
Equator, and then sent on an errand to the Southern Pole; forced
through transmigrations of fish, fowl and flesh; and, if in some
corner of creation the poor thing finds leisure to die, searched
out and whipped to life again and kept in its constant round.

Thus the stuff that we weigh, handle and tread upon is only the
show of invisible substances, the facts over which subtle and
mighty forces rule.

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