asseverates with many oaths as he points me out
for the admiration of his fellows:  "Tell yer he's
the cove as found the money for Davie Garden
to back Boldwin with, and he's just come out o'
the Life office, vere he's bin a droring the
stakes."

                  ATOMS.

WE would be as gods, knowing all things;
and the child is father to the man. The boy
breaks up his most ingenious toys, to surprise
the secrets hidden within; the man dissects,
analyses, probes all nature, to discover the
ultimate qualities and causes of everything.
It is quite an error to suppose that curiosity is
a passion to which the fair sex is peculiarly
propense.  Tell either man or boy that there is
a thing he cannot do, a place he cannot visit,
a fact he cannot ascertain, and no rest is his
until he has effected the thing, reached the
spot, tested the circumstance.  From what else
should arise the strong attraction which the
transmutation of metals, the top of Mount
Cervin, the constitution of matter, exercises
on multitudes?

Respecting the latter subject of inquiry,
modern science has drawn up for itself a creed
which is almost as precise as a treatise on
arithmetic.  Whether future philosophers will
modify those notions, it remains for a future
period to show.  There seems at present every
probability that we have really hit upon the truth.

Matter is known to us under three forms:
solid, liquid, and gaseous.  The ethereal
modification of matter (the attenuated ether which
fills the interplanetary and intersidereal spaces)
we do not know, but only infer, suppose, and
guess at.  But, as Professor Tyndall quietly
observes, there is no more difficulty in
conceiving this ether, as it is called, which fills
space, than in imagining all space filled with jelly.

All matter, of whatever form, is believed to
be made up of atoms.  Gases, we can easily
conceive to consist of independent particles
which repel each other; liquids, to be made up
of minute molecules, behaving, when poured
out, like grains of wheat or sand, still held
together by a slight attraction; but there is
much greater difficulty in granting solid bodies
to be collections, groups, or aggregates, of atoms
not in actual contact with each other.

Solid bodies especially, therefore, have long
puzzled people who have considered them with
careful attention.  They expand, and they
contract.  How?  It must be by the expansion
and contraction of their constituent parts.  But
what are their constituent parts?  They cannot
be anything else than atoms of inconceivable
littleness.  According to many philosophers,
group atoms together, and you have a molecule;
but, in common parlance, atoms and molecules
may be regarded as synonymous.  Combine
molecules in sufficient quantity, and you
produce a particle—a portion of matter, of form
and size appreciable by the human eye.

Matter is similar in its nature, throughout
the solar system at least.  Spectral analysis has
shown that minerals, found on earth, are also
contained in the sun and the planets, not to
mention diverse and sundry fixed stars.  The
same fact is proved by the examination of
bolides, or shooting stars.

A bolide is a planet in miniature: a small
mass of matter, revolving round the sun in a
longer or shorter elliptical orbit, obeying the
same laws and governed by the same forces as
the greater planets.  Now, suppose the orbit
described by a bolide to cross the orbit of the
earth, exactly as one road crosses another, and,
moreover, that the two travellers reach the
point of junction or crossing at the very same
time.  A collision is the inevitable consequence.
The bolide, which, in respect to size, is no more
than a pebble thrown against a railway train,
will strike the earth without her inhabitants
experiencing, generally, the slightest shock.
If individuals happen to be hit, the case will
be different.  If the earth arrive there a little
before or after the bolide, but at a relatively
trifling distance, she will attract it, cause it to
quit its own orbit, dragging it after her, an
obedient slave, to revolve around her until it
falls to her surface.  Or, it may happen that the
bolide may pass too far away for the earth to
drag it into her clutches, and yet near enough
to make it swerve from its course.  It may even
enter our atmosphere, and yet make its escape.
But, in the case of its entering the atmosphere,
its friction against the air will cause it to become
luminous and hot, perhaps determining an
explosion.  Such are the meteors whose appearance
at enormous heights our newspapers record
from time to time.

Be it remarked that bolides are true planets,
and not projectiles shot out from mountains in
the moon, as has been conjectured.  A
projectile coming from the moon would reach the
earth with a velocity of about seven miles per
second.  But the most sluggish bolide travels
at the rate of nearly nineteen miles per second,
fast-goers doing their six-and-thirty miles in
the same short space of time . None of the
inferior planets travel so rapidly as that.
Mercury, the swiftest of them all, gets over only
thirty miles per second.  Mr. Tyndall states
that this enormous speed is certainly competent
to produce the effects ascribed to it.

When a bolide, then, glances sufficiently close
to our earth, to pass through our atmosphere,
the resulting friction makes its surface red hot,
and so renders it visible to us.  The sudden rise
of temperature modifies its structure.  The
unequal expansion causes it to explode with a
report which is audible.  If the entire mass
does not burst, it at least throws off splinters
and fragments.  The effect is the same
as that produced by pouring boiling water upon
glass.  The fragments, falling to the ground,
are aërolites.  It is needless here to cite
instances of their falling.  They are of universal
notoriety.  Aërolites have no new substance to
offer us.  If the earth, therefore, be made up of
atoms, we may conclude that the universe is
made up of atoms.