[Footnote 71: “Our atmosphere,” says Dr. Hunt, “is not terrestrial, but cosmical, being a universal medium diffused throughout all space, but condensed around the various centres of attraction in amount proportional to their mass and temperature, the waters of the ocean themselves belonging to this universal atmosphere.” (_Nature_, August 29, 1878, p. 475.) Similar views have been advocated by Mr. Mattieu Williams, who says “that the gaseous ocean, in which we are immersed, is but a portion of the infinite atmosphere that fills the whole solidity of space; that links together all the elements of the universe, and diffuses among them their heat and light, and all the other physical and vital forces which heat and light are capable of generating.” (_Fuel of the Sun_, p. 5.) In 1854 Sir William Thomson suggested the idea that the luminiferous ether was probably a continuation of our atmosphere, though I do not think he continues to hold that opinion. The first to advance this idea was, undoubtedly, Newton, who assumed interplanetary space to be universally filled with an ethereal medium “much of the same constitution as air, but far rarer, subtler, and more elastic.”] _Professor Oliver Lodge on the pre-nebular condition of matter._—Some have gone still farther back and supposed that the material universe may have arisen out of the luminiferous ether—the hypothetical medium which is assumed to pervade all space. The universal world-stuff scattered through boundless space may in an extreme state of attenuation be, says Professor Winchell, the ethereal medium, and out of this semi-spiritual substance may have germinated the molecules of common matter. “It is certainly possible,” he says, “to conceive these cosmical atoms as a rising-out of some transformation of the ethereal medium; but we know too little of the nature of ether to ground a scientific inference of this kind.”[72] [Footnote 72: _World Life_, p. 533.]