hey fall apart and recombine.

"If we pass a current of electricity through this sealed jar
containing oxygen and hydrogen in mechanical union, the spark
that leaps across the points furnishes the heat, and a drop of
water appears and falls to the bottom. A large portion of the
gases has disappeared. It has been converted into water. What
is left of the gases will expand and fill the bottle.

"The drop of water but for local causes, but for a certain
attraction of the earth, would float in the centre of the jar at
the centre of gravity, as the earth does in space. But the
centre of gravity of the two bodies is far within the earth, and
the drop gets as close to it as it can. The earth's 'pull' takes
it to the bottom. If the jar were far enough away in space the
drop would float, as the earth floats, at a point where all pulls
balance, and the drop of water would have enough pull of its own,
enough gravity within itself to hold all the gas left in the jar
to itself as an atmosphere. It would be a centre of energy, a
minature world.

"The drop of water is not a homogenous mass. About one third of
the bulk of the drop of water is made up of independent oxygen
and hydrogen atoms interspersed through it, as any liquid is
through this piece of blotting paper. And it has, and keeps, by
its own attraction, an atmosphere of the gas. Each molecule of
water has a thin layer, or skin, of the gas; even as it comes
from this faucet.

"Let us return again to the physical dust, the atom. Why should
it form by fives for iron, by nines for hydrogen? Where did the
atom come from? What is it? We know that like the drop of
water, it is a miniature world with an atmosphere of ether; and
the natural inference is that it is made from ether as the drop
of water was made from gas. Many things confirm this inference,
and it may be accepted as 'a working hypothesis' that it is made
from ether as the drop of water is made from gas, by the chemical
union of a large amount of ether of different kinds, the etheric
molecules of which consist of 2 and 3 or 5 and 4 etheric atoms,
and that the tendency to combine in this or that number in
physical matter is an inherited tendency brought with it from the
etheric world of matter on which, or in which, each element of
this world is two or more. There is no kind of matter in this
physical world, that has not its prototype in the etheric, and
the laws of its action and reaction here ar