Yet, about the oldest of the mountains there is nothing which is absolutely enduring. Equally with the newer hills, geological progress and action are written on the face of their history. The hills are only phases of cosmical arrangement; they are here in the to-day of the world; they may be gone in the world's to-morrow. Before Science had learned to lisp this, the prophetic word of men moved by the Holy Ghost had said: "Of old Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them and they shall be changed." The world is neither perfect nor finished in a geological sense, any more than it is perfect in an ethical sense. It is full of progressive action everywhere, and, to quote from another author, "our planet and our solar system are but as the small dust of the balance in the colossal scale of the worlds that are." Had there been no one to read the future in the light of the past, among those who witnessed the production of the force discovered by Keely in 1872, he could not have continued his researches, as he has done during these intervening years, from lack of the funds necessary to carry them on. But there were men who knew the worth of the discovery, and who, sanguine as to almost immediate results, did something more than stand idly "ready to welcome" them when produced. They furnished the money with which Keely laboured year after year, and encouraged him to persevere, when without such aid he might have been forced to abandon his researches for want of the necessaries of life. During this period, Keely's discovery was only thought of in reference to its commercial value, and for a decade he made no progress: but, after his researches led up to the conviction that he was on the road to another and infinitely more important discovery, namely, the source of life and the connecting link between intelligent will and matter, his progress has been almost uninterrupted. His ambition is not only to give a costless motive power to the world, but to make clear to men of science the path he is exploring. CHAPTER II. 1882 TO 1886. ETHER THE TRUE PROTOPLASM, AN EPITOME OF MACVICAR'S SKETCH OF A PHILOSOPHY. All that has been predicted of atoms, their attractions and repulsions, according to the primary laws of their being, only becomes intelligible when we assume the presence of mind.--Sir John F. W. Herschell (1865). It is in no small degree reassuring to find that we are not chained to inert matter, but to the living energies of its forms.... This leads us to the inference, long suspected, that all matter, as well as the ethereal medium itself consists ultimately of one and the same primordial element.--Col. A. T. Fraser, Darkness and Light in the Land of Egypt.