In like manner the latest speculation regarding the nature of matter--the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson--seems, so far from having any tendency to exclude creative action, necessarily to imply it. He supposes that the atoms may be small vortex-rings in the ether, the rotating portions of a perfect fluid which fills all space. But a perfect fluid can neither explain its own existence nor the commencement of rotation in any part of it. Rotation once commenced in a perfect or frictionless and incompressible fluid would continue for ever, but it never could naturally commence. There is nothing in a perfect fluid to account either for the origin or cessation of rotation, and consequently nothing, on the vortex-atom hypothesis, to account either for the production or destruction of an atom of matter. The origin and cessation of rotation in fluids are due to their imperfection, their internal friction, their viscosity. The origin or cessation of rotation in a perfect fluid must be the effect of supernatural action; in other words, every vortex-atom must owe the rotation which gives it its individuality to a Divine impulse. A theist has certainly no need, then, to be afraid of researches into the ultimate nature of matter. Our knowledge thereof is exceedingly small and imperfect, but all that we do know of it, all that we can even rationally conceive of it, leads to the inference that it is not self-existent, but the work of God. The farther research is pushed, the more clearly, we may be assured, will this become apparent, for the more wonderfully adapted will the ultimate constituents of matter be found for assuming countless forms and composing countless objects--the air, the land, the sea, and starry heavens, with all that in or on them is. Research has already shown us reason to believe "that even chemical atoms are very complicated structures; that an atom of pure iron is probably a vastly more complicated system than that of the planets and their satellites; that each constituent of a chemical atom must go through an orbit in the millionth part of the twinkling of an eye, in which it successively or simultaneously is under the influence of many other constituents, or possibly comes into collision with them; that each of these particles is, as Sir John Herschel has beautifully said, for ever solving differential equations which, if written out in full, might perhaps belt the earth."[17] Now, what does this mean, if not that every ultimate atom of matter is full to the very heart of it with evidences of the power and wisdom of God, and that every particle of dust or drop of water is crowded with traces of the action of the Divine Reason, not less marvellous, it may be, than those which astronomy exhibits in the structure of the heavens and the evolutions of the heavenly bodies? Those who hoped that molecular science would help them to get rid of God have obviously made a profound mistake. It