SECTION 8. _The force that makes a thing hold together: Cohesion._ What makes rain fall in drops? Why are diamonds hard? You have not yet touched any of the most dangerous switches on the imaginary switchboard of universal laws. But if your experience in turning off the capillary attraction and adhesion switches did not discourage you, you might try turning off the one beside them labeled COHESION: [Illustration: FIG. 22. El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California. If the force of cohesion were suspended, a mountain like this would immediately become the finest dust.] Things happen too swiftly for you to know much about them. The house you are in falls to dust instantly. You fall through the place where the floor has been; but you do not bump on the cement basement floor below, partly because there is no such thing as a hard floor or even hard ground anywhere, and partly because you disintegrate--fall to pieces--so completely that there is nothing left of you but a grayish film of fine dust and a haze of warm water. With a deafening roar, rocks, skyscrapers, and even mountains tumble down, fall to pieces, and sink into an inconceivably fine dust. Nothing stands up in the world--not a tree, not an animal, not an island. With a wild rush the oceans flood in over the dust that has been nations and continents, and then this dust turns to a fine muddy ooze in the bottom of a worldwide sea. But it is an ocean utterly different from what we have in the real world. There are no waves. Neither are there any reflections of clouds in its surface,--first because the clouds would fly to pieces and turn to invisible vapor, and second, because the ocean has no surface--it simply melts away into the air and no one can tell where the water stops and where the air begins. Then the earth grows larger and larger. The ocean turns to a heavy, dense, transparent steam. The fine mud that used to be rocks and mountains and living things turns to a heavy, dense gas. Our once beautiful, solid, warm, living earth now whirls on through space, a swollen, gaseous globe, utterly dead.