. Cosmic law; the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. andwithout the exercise of invention! But let us look further into the construction of this greatmachine, to see if we can discover the secret of its driving-power, gravitation,—a secret which involves both the originand the transmission of the tremendous force that handles 1 Those enormous distances are measured in terms of light-years, for convenience of expression. A light-year is the distancewhich light travels in one year—more than seven trillions of distance from the earth of 168 nebulae (a very few, in compari
. Cosmic law; the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. andwithout the exercise of invention! But let us look further into the construction of this greatmachine, to see if we can discover the secret of its driving-power, gravitation,—a secret which involves both the originand the transmission of the tremendous force that handles 1 Those enormous distances are measured in terms of light-years, for convenience of expression. A light-year is the distancewhich light travels in one year—more than seven trillions of distance from the earth of 168 nebulae (a very few, in comparisonwith the whole number known) has been found to average 700 light-years; or, in other words, about five thousand millions of millions ofmiles. NATUKES INANIMATE WOEKS 189 suns and planets as though they were grains of sand. Wefind the secret of the origin of gravitation to be utterly in-scrutable, but its transmission evidently depends, in someunknown way, upon the luminiferous ether. For, we cannotconceive of mechanical power being transmitted without some. Fig. 16. Nebula. adequate means of transmission. We know, from the opera-tion of our dynamos, that the ether is an adequate means forthe transmission of enormous mechanical power. So far asscience is able to inform us, there is no other substance thanether which extends continuously from every star to every 190 NATURES INANIMATE WORKS other star, and even from every atom to every other atom inthe universe. There can, therefore, be no reasonable doubtthat the luminiferous ether is the means employed for trans-mitting the motive-power of the celestial machinery. The more we study that machinery, the more wonderfulit appears, and the more conspicuous is the fact of its creativecontrivance. So far as it is composed of matter, it obeys thelaws of matter just as do all the machines invented by man,and we can as readily understand it as we do mans ma-chines. But, as we have seen, it is not composed of matteralone, but contai
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