Having got this length we have still to go one step farther. We cannot now doubt that the ether is a material substance, and if it is, there is nothing to prevent us from considering it to be the primitive matter; in fact it would be absurd to look upon it in any other light. We cannot conceive of anything having been created before the ether, or ordained before the law of attraction, and thus we have the two coeval and one. It is long years since physicists, chemists especially perhaps, began to think that the great number of chemical elements cannot all have existed from the beginning of things, and that it is far more probable that they have all been evolved from one primitive substance, and this idea must now be gathering more strength from day to day in view of the new elements that are being constantly discovered; the unknown is being made known, and the air we breathe instead of being one in four elements, as in former times it was considered to be, is now not far from double that number in one. Adopting this notion, then, the ether is much more likely to have been the primitive element than any other material substance that can be thought of. If it has never been thought of in this light, it has come to be very remarkably near it, as may be seen by referring to the long quotation we made in Chapter VII., beginning at page 129, where the idea of the ether being the connecting _medium_ of matter is made use of to compute its density. Little thought we of this when we made the quotation, but there was the idea whether the author saw or not all that was implied in it.