the calculation to the end. He would have found that the temperature of the earth would have to increase 1013 degrees a second.
IV
Conclusions
I have striven to give in few words an idea as complete as possible of these new doctrines; I have sought to explain how they took birth; otherwise the reader would have had ground to be frightened by their boldness. The new theories are not yet demonstrated; far from it; only they rest upon an aggregate of probabilities sufficiently weighty for us not to have the right to treat them with disregard.
New experiments will doubtless teach us what we should finally think of them. The knotty point of the question lies in Kaufmann’s experiment and those that may be undertaken to verify it.
In conclusion, permit me a word of warning. Suppose that, after some years, these theories undergo new tests and triumph; then our secondary education will incur a great danger: certain professors will doubtless wish to make a place for the new theories.
Novelties are so attractive, and it is so hard not to seem highly advanced! At least there will be the wish to open vistas to the pupils and, before teaching them the ordinary mechanics, to let them know it has had its day and was at best good enough for that old dolt Laplace. And then they will not form the habit of the ordinary mechanics.
Is it well to let them know this is only approximative? Yes; but later, when it has penetrated to their very marrow, when they shall have taken the bent of thinking only through it, when there shall no longer be risk of their unlearning it, then one may, without inconvenience, show them its limits.
It is with the ordinary mechanics that they must live; this alone will they ever have to apply. Whatever be the progress of automobilism, our vehicles will never attain speeds where it is not true. The other is only a luxury, and we should think of the luxury only when there is no longer any risk of harming the necessary.
