movement far away from cities, where the mercurial mirror of a seismoscope showed no subterranean vibration. It does not increase when the vibrations occur and become quite appreciable. Neither is it changed by variation in light, magnetism, or electric influences; in a word, by any external occurrences. The result of observation is to place before us the paradox of a phenomenon which is kept up and indefinitely perpetuated in the interior of a body without known external cause.
The Brownian Movement must be the First Stage of Molecular Motion.—When we take in our hands a sheet of quartz containing a gaseous inclusion, we seem to be holding a perfectly inert object. When we have placed it upon the stage of the microscope, and have seen the agitation of the bubble, we are convinced that this seeming inertia is merely an illusion.
Repose exists only because of our limited vision. We see the objects as we see from afar a crowd of people. We perceive them only as a whole, without being able to discern the individuals or their movements. A visible object is, in the same way, a mass of particles. It is a molecular crowd. It gives us the impression of an indivisible mass, of a block in repose.
But as soon as the lens brings us near to this crowd, as soon as the microscope enlarges for us the minute elements of the brute body, then they appear to us, and we perceive the continual agitation of those elements which are less than four thousandths of a millimetre in diameter. The smaller the particles under consideration, the more lively are their movements. From this we infer that if we could perceive
