I refer to precise and recent data, established by the most expert investigators, and related by one of them, Charles Edward Guillaume, some years ago, before the Société helvétique des Sciences naturelles. These data show that determinate forms of matter may live and die, in the sense that they may be slowly and continuously modified, always in the same direction, until they have attained an ultimate and definitive state of eternal repose.
The Internal Movements of Bodies.—Swift's reply to an idle fellow who spoke slightingly of work is well known. "In England," said the author of Gulliver's Travels, "men work, women work, horses work, oxen work, water works, fire works, and beer works; it is only the pig who does nothing at all; he must, therefore, be the only gentleman in England." We know very well that English gentlemen also work. Indeed, everybody and everything works. And the great wit was nearer right than he supposed in comparing men and things in this respect. Everything is at work; everything in nature strives and toils, at every stage, in every degree. Immobility and repose in the case of natural things are usually deceptive; the seeming quietude of matter is caused by our inability to appreciate its internal movements. Because of their minuteness we do not perceive the swarming particles that compose it, and which, under the impassible surface of the bodies, oscillate, displace each other, move to and fro, and group themselves into forms and positions adapted to the conditions of the environment. In comparison with these microscopic elements we are like Swift's giant among the Lilliputians; and this is far from being a sufficiently forcible comparison.
