stance we are no better off than a band of captives who have found out in what manner to mutilate themselves, so as to render them uninteresting to their victorious foe.
7. But if our knowledge of the nature and habits of organized molecules be so small, our knowledge of the ultimate molecules of inorganic matter is, if possible, still smaller. It is only very recently that the leading men of science have come to consider their very existence as a settled point.
In order to realize what is meant by an inorganic molecule, let us take some sand and grind it into smaller and smaller particles, and these again into still smaller. In point of fact we shall never reach the superlative degree of smallness by this operation—yet in our imagination we may suppose the sub-division to be carried on continuously, always making the particles smaller and smaller. In this case we should, at last, come to an ultimate molecule of sand or oxide of silicon, or, in other words, we should arrive at the smallest entity retaining all the properties of sand, so that were it possible to divide the molecule further the only result would be to separate it into its chemical constituents, consisting of silicon on the one side and oxygen on the other.
We have, in truth, much reason to believe that sand, or any other substance, is incapable of infinite subdivision, and that all we can do in grinding down a solid lump of anything is to reduce it into lumps similar to the original, but only less in size, each of these small
