NTIFIC POSSIBILITIES"

"Sir,--I have read with amusement, not wholly unmixed with some less
complimentary emotion, the complacent and wholly fatuous letter of James
Wilson MacPhail which has lately appeared in your columns upon the
subject of the blurring of Fraunhofer's lines in the spectra both of the
planets and of the fixed stars. He dismisses the matter as of no
significance. To a wider intelligence it may well seem of very great
possible importance--so great as to involve the ultimate welfare of every
man, woman, and child upon this planet. I can hardly hope, by the use of
scientific language, to convey any sense of my meaning to those
ineffectual people who gather their ideas from the columns of a daily
newspaper. I will endeavour, therefore, to condescend to their
limitation and to indicate the situation by the use of a homely analogy
which will be within the limits of the intelligence of your readers."

"Man, he's a wonder--a living wonder!" said McArdle, shaking his head
reflectively. "He'd put up the feathers of a sucking-dove and set up a
riot in a Quakers' meeting. No wonder he has made London too hot for
him. It's a peety, Mr. Malone, for it's a grand brain! We'll let's have
the analogy."

"We will suppose," I read, "that a small bundle of connected corks was
launched in a sluggish current upon a voyage across the Atlantic. The
corks drift slowly on from day to day with the same conditions all round
them. If the corks were sentient we could imagine that they would
consider these conditions to be permanent and assured. But we, with our
superior knowledge, know that many things might happen to surprise the
corks. They might possibly float up against a ship, or a sleeping whale,
or become entangled in seaweed. In any case, their voyage would probably
end by their being thrown up on the rocky coast of Labrador. But what
could they know of all this while they drifted so gently day by day in
what they thought was a limitless and homogeneous ocean?

"Your readers will possibly comprehend that the Atlantic, in this
parable, stands for the mighty ocean of ether through which we drift and
that the bunch of corks represents the little and obscure planetary
system to which we belong. A third-rate sun, with its rag tag and
bobtail of insignificant satellites, we float under the same daily
conditions towards some unknown end, some squalid catastrophe which will
overwhelm us at the ultimate confines o