The thought is interesting, and is mentioned here for that reason. It is not affected by the supposition that there may be a still finer and rarer form of Substance, from which the Particles are "manufactured"--in fact, the idea of Herschel, if closely analyzed, would seem to indicate some such "raw material" from which the articles were manufactured. CHAPTER VII THE PARADOX OF SCIENCE In the days of the ancients, when the philosophers found themselves unable to account for any particular class of phenomena, they bundled it together and referred it to a suppositious Something that they called "The Ether." Finding this an easy way to get rid of vexatious questions, they fell into the custom--and the habit grew upon them. Soon there were a dozen or more different kind of Ethers in vogue, each explaining something else--the "something else," by the way, being things that Science _now_ feels that it understands pretty well. These Ethers grew to be like the various "Vapors" of the ancients--a dignified term for "We don't know"--a respectable road for retreat under the semblance of an advance. These Ethers became a scientific scandal, and caused a lax mode of thinking among students of those times. And so they were finally abolished and relegated to the scrap pile of Science, where they lay for many centuries until a comparatively recent period, when at least one of them was hauled forth, dusted, freshened up a little, and placed upon its old pedestal. This revamped Ether, referred to, was the "Ether of Aristotle." Aristotle, as we know, was a famous Greek philosopher who lived about 350 B.C.--about 2250 years ago. He was a good man and a celebrated philosopher, but was somewhat deficient in scientific knowledge. Although he knew many things, and uttered many wise thoughts, he was under the impression that the breath of Man entered the heart instead of the lungs--that the back part of the skull was empty, and so on. He was without the advantages of a modern training--which, was not his fault, however. Well, Aristotle conceived the idea of an Universal Ether, which he thought pervaded all space, and with which he accounted for the passage of light from the sun and stars; the movements of the planets, and various other physical phenomena. It is not known whether Aristotle really _believed_ in this Ether, or whether he merely used it as a speculative hypothesis, following the Ether Habit of his contemporaries. At any rate, his theory served its purpose--lived, flourished, declined and died--at least seemed to be dead. But its corpse was resurrected in modern times, and used to account for divers things. This does not mean that modern thinkers really "believe" in the Universal Ether--they merely assume it as a working hypothesis until something better is offered.