e laws which it
inherits and brings with it. They are not laws made here. They
are laws of the other world--even as the matter itself is matter
of the other world.

"In 1882, Professor Lodge, in a lecture before the Royal
Institution on 'The Luminiferous Ether' defined it as:

"'One continuous substance, filling all space, which can vibrate
as light, which can be sheared into positive and negative
electricity, which in whirls constitutes matter, and which
transmits by continuity and not impact every action and reaction
of which matter is capable.'

"This reads today like baby-talk but at that time (eighteen years
ago), it was considered by many timid conservative scientists as
'a daring movement.' It is noteworthy in that it was the first
public scientific announcement that the physical matter is a
manifestation or form of the ether. And it was made before
general acceptance of the division of the ether into soniferous,
luminiferous and tangiferous.

"'Which in whirls constitutes matter.' Professor Lodge believed
that 'some etheric molecules revolved so rapidly on their axis
that they could not be penetrated.' Watch the soap-bubbles that
I am blowing. Each and every one is revolving as the earth
revolves, from west to east. What I wish to call your attention
to is the fact that can be proven, both mathematically and
theoretically, that at a certain rate of speed in the revolution
they could not be penetrated by any rifle-ball. At a higher rate
of speed they would be harder than globes of solid chilled steel,
harder even than carbon. Professor Lodge believed that the
etheric molecule revolved so rapidly that, thin as it was in its
shell, it gave us the dust out of which worlds were made. There
is one fatal error in this idea, although it is held even now by
many. It is based entirely on gravity, and gravity is alone
considered in its problems. There are two great forces in the
universe, not one, as many scientific people fail to remember
--Gravity and Apergy, or the centrifugal and centripetal forces.
The pull in is and must be always balanced by the pull out.
There is in the universe as much repulsion as attraction, and the
former is a force quite as important as the latter. The bubble's
speed kept increasing until apergy, the tendency to fly off,
overcame gravity, and it ruptured.

"Professor Lodge failed to take into account this apergic force,
this tendency to fly off, when he gave such high re