Part 36

We know of nothing that can penetrate every form of matter without adding either to its weight or its bulk; we know of nothing that can communicate motion to ponderable matter without itself being ponderable—_i.e._, having the primary property of matter, viz., mass, or weight, and consequent _vis viva_ when moving; we know of nothing that can set bodies in motion without proportionally resisting the motion of bodies through it; and if the waving of the ether is (as Tyndall describes it) “as real and as truly mechanical as the breaking of sea-waves upon the shore,” the material of the breakers must be like the “jelly” to which he compares it, and have some viscosity, or resistance to penetration, or pushing aside.

We have not a shadow of direct evidence of the existence of the “interatomic” spaces occupied by the other, and in the midst of which the atoms are made to theoretically swing, nor even of the existence of the atoms themselves.

The “ether” of to-day, with its imaginary penetration and its material action without material properties, has merely taken the place of the equally imaginary phlogiston, caloric, electric, and magnetic fluids, the “imponderables” of the past. I have little doubt that ere long the modern modification of these physical superstitions will share their fate, and we shall all adopt the simple conception that heat, light, end electricity are, like sound, merely transmissible states or affections of matter itself regarded bodily, as it is seen and felt to exist.

This may possibly throw a good many mathematicians out of work—or into more useful work; but, however that may be, it will certainly aid the general diffusion of science as the intellectual inheritance of every human being. At present the explanations of the simple phenomena of light and heat are incomparably more difficult to understand and to account for than the facts which they attempt to elucidate.

A NEGLECTED DISINFECTANT.

When the household of our grandmothers was threatened with infection, the common practice was to sprinkle brimstone on a hot shovel or on hot coals on a shovel, and carry the burning result through the house. But now this simple method of disinfecting has gone out of fashion without any good and sufficient reason. The principal reason is neither good nor sufficient, viz., that nobody can patent it and sell it in shilling and half-crown bottles.

On September 18th last, M. d’Abbadie read a paper at the Academy of Sciences on “Marsh Fevers,” and stated that in the dangerous regions of African river mouths immunity from such-fevers is often secured by sulphur fumigations on the naked body. Also that the Sicilian workers in low ground sulphur mines suffer much less than the rest of the surrounding population from intermittent fevers. M. Fouqué has shown that Zephyria (on the volcanic island of Milo or Melos, the most westerly of the Cyclades), which had a population of 40,000 when it was the centre of sulphur-mining operations, became nearly depopulated by marsh fever when the sulphur-mining was moved farther east, and the emanations prevented by a mountain from reaching the town. Other similar cases were stated.

It is well understood by chemists that bleaching agents are usually good disinfectants; that which can so disturb an organic compound as to destroy its color, is capable of either arresting or completing the decompositions that produce vile odors and nourish the organic germs or ferments which usual accompany, or, as some affirm, cause them. Sulphurous acid is, next to hypochlorous acid, one of the most effective bleaching agents within easy reach.

I should add that sulphurous acid is the gas that is _directly_ formed by burning sulphur. By taking up another dose of oxygen it becomes sulphuric acid, which, combined with water, is oil of vitriol. The bleaching and disinfecting action of the sulphurous acid is connected with its activity in appropriating the oxygen which is loosely held or being given off by organic matter. Chlorine and hypochlorous acid (which is still more effective than chlorine itself) act in the opposite way, so do the permanganates, such as Condy’s fluid, etc. They supply oxygen in the presence of water. It is curious that opposite actions should produce like results. A disquisition on this and its suggestions would carry me beyond the limits of a note.

ANOTHER DISINFECTANT.

The above-named disinfectants are objectionable on account of their own odors and their corrosive action. Both sulphurous acid and hypochlorous acid (the active principle of the so-called “chloride of lime”) have a disagreeable habit of rusting iron and suggesting antique green bronzes by their action on brass ornaments. Under serious conditions this should be endured, but in many cases where the danger is not already developed, the desired end may be attained without these annoyances.

Sulphate of copper, which is not patented or “brought out” by a limited company, may be bought at its fair retail value of 6_d._ or less per lb. (the oil-shop name for it is “blue vitriol”), in crystals, readily soluble in water.

I have lately used it in the case of a trouble to which English households are too commonly liable, and one that has in many cases done serious mischief. The stoppage of a soil-pipe caused the overflow of a closet, and a consequent saturation of floor boards, that in time would probably have developed danger by nourishing and developing those germs of bacteria, bacilli, etc., which abound in the air, and are ready to increase and multiply wherever their unsavory food abounds.

By simply mopping the floor with a solution of these green crystals, and allowing it to soak well into the pores of the wood, they cease to become a habitat for such microscopic abominations. The copper-salt poisons the poisoners.

Dr. Burg goes so far as to recommend that building materials, articles of furniture, and clothing, etc., should be injected with sulphate of copper, in order to avert infection, and in support of this refers to the immunity of workers in copper from cholera, typhoid fever, and infectious diseases generally.

I agree with him to the extent of suggesting the desirability of occasionally mopping house floors with this solution. Its visible effects on the wood are first to stain it with a faint green tinge which gradually tones down to a brown stain, giving to deal the appearance of oak, a change which has no disadvantage from an artistic point of view. If the wood is already tainted with organic matter capable of giving off sulphureted hydrogen, the darkening change is more rapid and decided, owing to the formation of sulphide of copper.

The solution of sulphate should not be put into iron or zinc vessels, as it rapidly corrodes them, and deposits a non-adherent film of copper. It will even disintegrate common earthenware, by penetrating the glaze, and crystallizing within the pores of the ware, but this is a work of time (weeks or months). Stoneware resists this, and wooden buckets may be used safely. It is better to keep the crystals and dissolve when required. Ordinary earthenware may be used with impunity if washed immediately afterwards.

ENSILAGE.

This subject has been largely expounded and discussed lately in the _Times_ and other newspapers. As most of my readers are doubtless aware, it is simply a substitute for haymaking, by digging pits, paving and building them round with stone or concrete, then placing the green fodder therein and covering it over with sufficient earth to exclude the air.

We are told that very inferior material (such as coarse maize grass mixed with chaff) when thus preserved gives better feeding and milking results than good English hay.

I may mention a very humble experience of my own that bears upon this. When a boy, I was devoted to silkworms, and my very small supply of pocket-money was over-taxed in the purchase of exorbitantly small pennyworths of mulberry leaves at Covent Garden. But a friend in the country had a mulberry tree, and at rather long intervals I obtained large supplies, which, in spite of all my careful wrapping in damp cloths, became rotted in about ten days. I finally tried digging a hole and burying them. They remained fresh and green until all my silkworms commenced the working and fasting stage of their existence. This was ensilage on a small scale.

The correspondence in the newspapers has suggested a number of reasons why English farmers do not follow the example of their continental neighbors in this respect; climate, difference of grasses, etc., etc., are named, but the real reason why this is commercially impossible, and farming, properly so called, is becoming a lost art in England (mere meadow or prairie grazing gradually superseding it) is not named in any part of the discussion that I have read.

I refer to the cause which is abolishing the English dairy, which drives us to the commercial absurdity of importing fragile eggs from France, Italy, Spain, etc., apples from the other side of the Atlantic, tame house-fed rabbits from Belgium, and so on, with all other agricultural products which are precisely those we are _naturally_ best able to produce at home; I mean _those demanding a small area of land and a proportionately large amount of capital and labor_. A poultry or rabbit farm, acre for acre, demands fully ten times the capital, ten times the labor, and yields ten times the produce obtained by our big-field beef and mutton graziers.

The scientific and economic merits of ensilage are probably all that is claimed for it, and it is especially adapted for our uncertain haymaking climate, but what farmer who is merely a lodger on the land, holding it as an annual tenant-at-will or under a stinted beggarly lease of 21 years, would expend his capital in building a costly _silo_, which becomes by our feudal laws and usages the absolute property of the landlord?

Our tenant farmers employ the latest and best achievements of engineering science in the form of implements, but take care that they shall be _upon wheels_, or otherwise non-fixtures, and use rich chemically prepared manures, provided they are not permanent, while they abstain from improvements which involve any serious outlay in the form of fixtures on the land. Those who lecture them about their want of enterprise should always remember that their condition is merely a form of feudal serfdom, tempered by the possession of capital, and that all their agricultural operations are influenced by a continual struggle to prevent their capital from falling into the hands of the feudal lord. Anybody who has ever read an ordinary form of English farm-lease, with its prohibitions concerning the sale of hay and straw, and restrictions to “four-course,” or other mode of cultivation, must see the hopelessness of any development of British agriculture comparable to that of British commerce and manufactures.

Imagine the condition of a London shopkeeper or Midland manufacturer holding his business premises as a yearly tenant, liable at six months’ notice to quit, with confiscation of all his business fixtures.

THE FRACTURE OF COMETS.

The view of the constitution of comets expounded in one of my notes of April last, viz., that they are meteoric systems consisting of a central mass, or masses, round which a multitude of minor bodies are revolving like satellites around their primary, is strongly confirmed by the curious proceedings of the present comet, which proceedings also justify my last note of last month pointing out the omission of our astronomers, who have neglected the positive and irregular repulsive action of the sun upon comets, that, like the great comets of 1843, 1880, and 1882, come within a few hundred thousand miles of the visible solar surface.

The solar prominences are stupendous eruptions from the sun, consisting, as the spectroscope demonstrates, of hydrogen flames and incandescent metallic vapors ejected with furious violence to visible distances ranging from ten or twenty to above three hundred thousand miles, but this flame shown by the spectroscope is but the flash of the gun, the actual ejection proceeding vastly farther, far beyond the limits of the corona, as described in last month’s notes. These eruptions are so abundant that Secchi alone observed and recorded 2767 in one year (1871). Speaking generally, the sun is never free from them, and they proceed from all parts of the sun, but most abundantly from the sun-spot zones.

A system of meteoric bodies such as I suppose to form a comet (I mean the comet as it exists in space before the generation of its tail, which is only formed as it approaches the sun) could not approach so near to the sun as did the present comet at perihelion, without encountering more or less of these furious blasts the flash of some of which have been seen to move with a measurable mean velocity of above 300 miles per second, and a probable maximum velocity sufficient to eject solid matter beyond the reclaiming grasp of solar gravitation.

It is evident that such a meteoric system as I suppose to constitute a comet would, in the course of a rapid perihelion flight crossing these outblasts, be liable to various degrees of ejection in different parts, that would disturb its original structure by blowing some of its constituents out of their orbits, or even quite away from the control of the feeble gravitation of the general meteoric mass, and thus effecting a rupture of the comet.

Now such a disintegration or dispersion of the present comet has been actually observed. Several able observers have described a breaking of the head of this comet shortly after its perihelion passage. Commander Sampson’s observations with the great 26-inch equatorial telescope of the Washington Naval Observatory are very explicit. On October 25 he saw the nucleus as a single well-defined globular body. On November 3, with the same telescope, he saw a triple nucleus, due to the formation of two additional minor bodies. These were more distinctly seen on November 6. Mr. W. R. Brooks, of New York, saw a detached fragment of the comet which afterwards faded out of view. Professor Schmidt observed another and similar fragment which has likewise disappeared.

All these observations indicate disruption due to some disturbing force, acting with different degrees of violence upon different portions of the comet.

Minor disturbances of this kind will, I think, account for the trail of meteoric bodies which Schiaparelli has shown to follow the paths of other comets. A great disturbance might give quite a new orbit to the meteoric fragments.

These considerations suggest another and a curious view of the question of possible cometary collision with the sun, viz., that a comet might be traveling in such an orbit as to make it mathematically due to plunge obliquely beneath the solar surface at its next perihelion; but on its approach to the surface of the sun it might encounter so violent an outrush of solar-prominence matter as to drive it bodily out of its course, and avert the threatened peril to its existence.

THE ORIGIN OF COMETS.

We read in story-books of uncomfortable people who have cherished a guilty secret in their bosoms, that it has “gnawed their vitals,” until at last they have carried it to the grave. I have such a secret that does the gnawing business whenever I write or speak of comets, concerning the origin of which I am guilty of an hypothesis that has hitherto been cherished as aforesaid from the very shame of adding another to an already exaggerated heap of speculations on celestial physics.

It assumes, in the first place, that all the other suns which we see as stars are constituted like our own sun; that they eject great eruptions similar to the prominences above described, and even of vastly greater magnitude, as in the case of the flashing stars that have excited so much wonderment among astronomers, but which I regard simply as suns like ours, subject, like ours, to periodic maximum and minimum activities, but of greater magnitude.

If such is the case, some of the prominence matter or vaporous constituents of these suns must be ejected with much greater proportional violence than are those from our sun. But those from our sun have been proved to rush out on some occasions with a velocity so great that the solar gravitation cannot bring them back. If such is ever the case with the explosions of our sun, it must be of frequent occurrence with the greater explosions of certain stars, and therefore vast quantities of meteoric matter are continually ejected into space, and traveling there until they come within the gravitation domain of some other sun like ours, when they will necessarily be bent into such orbits as those of comets.

But what will be the nature of this meteoric matter?

If from our sun, it would be a multitude of metallic hailstones, due to the condensation of the metallic vapor by cooling as it leaves the sun, and such meteoric hail would correspond to the meteoric stones that fall upon our earth, and which, for reasons stated in “The Fuel of the Sun,” I believe to be of solar origin. Besides these, there would be ice-hail, such as Schevedorf claims to be meteoric.

A star mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon, or densely enveloped in these gases (as the spectroscope indicates to be the case in some of these flashing stars), would eject hydrocarbon vapors, condensible by cooling into solids similar to those we obtain by the condensation of terrestrial hydrocarbon vapors (paraffin, camphor, turpentine, and all the essential oils, for example), and thus we should have the meteoric systems composed of these particles circulating about their own common centre of mass as above stated, and displaying the spectrum which Dr. Huggins has found common to comets.

If this is correct, the present comet comes from a sun that contains metallic sodium in addition to the hydrocarbons, as the spectrum of this metal was seen when this comet was near enough to the sun to render its vapor incandescent.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Up to the present date (1882) nobody, as far as I know, has questioned my figures or defended those of Wollaston. Sir William Grove has written to me, pointing out his own anticipations of my conclusions respecting the universality of atmospheric matter. Sir Charles Lyell, before his death, expressed very strong approval of my conclusions, and many other men of scientific eminence have done the same. To expect any immediate, unreserved adoption of such bold speculations would be unreasonable.

[2] Since the above was written these analogies have been generally accepted.

[3] Since the publication of “The Fuel of the Sun,” Mr. Norman Lockyer has adopted this view of solar dissociation, and has gone so far as to suppose that it splits metals and other substances regarded by modern chemists as simple elements into more elementary and simple constituents. He assumes that the temperature of the solar atmosphere, growing higher at increasing depths, becomes somewhere capable of doing far greater dissociation work than that which separates the hydrogen of the prominences revealed by the spectroscope. In putting forth this “working hypothesis” he seems to have lost sight of the fact clearly proved by Deville’s experiments, that the temperature of dissociation rises with the pressure to which the compound is subjected, and thus that within the bowels of the sun the metals will be far less dissociable than they are on the surface of our earth.

[4] Still more recently (1882) the magnificent photographs of Jannsen have displayed further evidence of the flame-tongue character of the mottling.

[5] Subsequent observations (1882) by Secchi, Young, and others have demonstrated velocities far exceeding this; quite sufficient to project the solid matter clearly beyond the sphere of solar attraction.

[6] My first memorandum on this subject is dated April 23, 1840, in a _Register of Ideas_, then commenced in very early student days.

[7] Any reader of “The Fuel of the Sun” will perceive that the vaporous envelope which I have described as “an effectual jacket for limiting the amount of radiation,” is a complete theoretical anticipation and explanation of the “solar crust” of Respighi and the “Trennungschicht” of Zöllner. We agree perfectly in our conclusions, though arriving at them by such very different paths, and so independently of each other.

[8] What did he smell? Was it an emanation from the soles of my feet? If so, how did this aura get through the soles of my boots, which were thick? It could scarcely have been the odor of the boot soles themselves that he followed, as he recognized me afterwards at some distance. This suggests an interesting experiment, that anybody owning one of these dogs may easily try. Make a similar track to mine, but when on the way, take off the boots you wore on starting and change them for some one else’s boots, or a new pair, and watch the result from the window.

[9] “The Fuel of the Sun,” Chapters iv. to x.

[10] Since this was written some such modifications have been made with equivocal results.

[11] _Nature_, vol. xiv. p. 429.

[12] See Chapter on “The Origin of Lunar Volcanoes.”

[13] The burnt card, burnt bamboo, and other flimsy incandescent threads now (1882) in vogue, merely represent Starr’s preliminary failures prior to his adoption of the hard adamantine stick of retort-carbon, which I suppose will be duly re-invented, patented again, and form the basis of new Limited Companies, when the present have collapsed.

[14] Hull, “On the Coal-fields of Great Britain.”

[15] “The Great Ice Age, and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man.” By James Geikie, F.R.S., etc. Second edition, revised, 1877. Daldy and Isbister.

[16] The terminal moraine at the Oxfjord station, which I have already mentioned as the only ancient example of an ordinary moraine that I have seen in Arctic Norway, was, of course, a special object of interest to me. Further observation showed that it does not merely consist of the heap of stones I noticed in 1856, which appears like a disturbed talus cut through and heaped up at its lower part, but that there is another moraine adjoining it, or in continuation with it, which is covered with vegetation, and stretches quite across the mouth of the valley. The Duke of Roxburgh, who is well acquainted with this neighborhood, having spent sixteen summers in Arctic Norway, was one of our fellow-passengers, and told me that this moraine forms a barrier that dams up the waters of a considerable lake, abounding with remarkably fine char. I learned this just as the packet was starting, too late to go on shore even for a few minutes, and obtain a view of this lake and the valley beyond. This I regret, as it might have revealed some explanation of the exceptional nature of this moraine. It would be interesting to learn whether it belongs to the greater ice age, or to that period of minor glaciation that fashioned the farm patches already described. The formation of the lake is easily understood in the latter case. It is only required that such a minor reglaciated valley as one of these should be of larger magnitude and of very gentle inclination at its lower part, so that the secondary glacier should die out before reaching the present seashore. It would then deposit its moraine across the mouth of the valley, and this moraine would dam up the waters which such a valley must necessarily receive from the drainage of its hilly sides. Llyn Idwal, in North Wales, is a lake thus formed.

[17] See “Through Norway with a Knapsack,” chapters xi. and xii., for further descriptions of these.

[18] Lyell, “Elements of Geology,” p. 159.