Excerpt from Spiritualism: Is Communication With the Spirit World an Established Fact? Lord Kelvin, then Sir William Thomson, for mulated the brilliant theory that the material atom may be a vortex-ring in a frictionless fluid. This Cosmic Ether is a bundle of paradoxes. It is so fine as to be out of the range of our tactual senses, and yet, instead of behaving like a gas in the last extremity Of attenuation, it acts like a solid or semi-solid - like a jelly. In this case it may be stratified, and correspond with matter, having its solid, fluid, gaseous, and radiant conditions. This would bring us to a state of fineness beside which what is called Spirit would be quite a tangible entity. Dr. Osborne Reynolds, e one of the men with heavy scientific appendages to their names, says that to complete the mechanical explanation of the structure of the universe, and explain with mathematical exactness all the known facts, we must postulate a perfect solid in place of the ether, and that all motion through it must be wave-motion; that it must be a granular substance of a mean density ten thousand times greater than that of water, or, as being four hundred times greater than that of the densest matter on earth; the mean pressure being nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand tons on the square inch. The minuteness of the grains of this solid, and their sphere of motion, all worked out mathemati cally, go beyond what is said of electrons, and they simply leave us gasping. Wild as these statements seem of these awful pressures, or stresses, they curiously correspond with the unthinkable energy of the electrons; T and the long course of beautiful experiments on which they are founded, give such startling, such unexpected results that they will probably lead to a revolution of scientific conceptions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.