"Our action's spontaneous in atoms uranious,
Or radious, actinious or thorious;
But for others, the gleam of a heaven-sent beam
Must encourage their efforts laborious.
"For many a day we've been slipping away
While the savants still doz'd in their slumbers,
Till at last came a man with gold leaf and tin can,
And detected our infinite numbers."
Thus the atoms in turn, we now clearly discern,
Fly to bits with the utmost facility.
They wend on their way, and in flitting, display
An absolute lack of stability.
'Tis clear they should halt on the grave of old Dalton
On their path to celestial spheres,
And a few thousand million—let's say a quadrillion—
Should bedew it with reverent tears.
But lest these views seem too somber and devoid of hope for the future, we must not forget that we may be looking at but one side of the mighty rhythm of nature. There may be also, still veiled from us, the compensating process by which atoms are formed and developed. This the author seems to feel and to express in his final verse:
There's nothing facetious in the way that Lucretius
Imagined the Chaos to quiver
And electrons to blunder, together, asunder,
In building up atoms forever.
The imaginative sketch of the atom which I have drawn must not be regarded as an accurate photograph. Many details are imperfectly known, many doubtless erroneous. But in its general outlines it reproduces the views of the foremost investigators, and it has proved eminently successful in unraveling the most extensive and perplexing body of facts that has ever been accumulated in so short a time.
But even when all difficulties shall have been smoothed away, and the electron enthroned above the atom, we shall not have reached the end. Even now we begin to hear discussions as to the shape of the electron, some holding it spherical, others flattened like the earth. There is, in fact, no final theory. "Every ultimate fact," says Emerson, "is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself." We live in a succession of infinities. The earth with all its multiplicity is but a small part of the solar system; that is but an insignificant unit in a mighty stellar group. And so within the smallest sensible particle of matter is the world of atoms, within the world of atoms the world of electrons. Who shall set a boundary in the one direction or in the other?
