t, or, rather, generated by its fall.
Another drop of six hundred feet would develop as much more; in fact,
the process may be repeated indefinitely, the same amount of power
resulting each time, without effecting any change in the character of
the water. The pull of gravity is the source of the power which is
distributed hundreds of miles across the country as electricity. Two
hundred and fifty thousand invisible, immaterial, noiseless horses are
streaming along these wires with incredible speed to do the work of men
and horses in widely separated parts of the country. A river of sand
falling down those tubes, if its particles moved among themselves with
the same freedom that those of the water do, would develop the same
power. The attraction of gravitation is not supposed to be electricity,
and yet here out of its pull upon the water comes this enormous voltage!
The fact that such a mysterious and ubiquitous power as electricity can
be developed from the action of matter without any alteration in its
particles, suggests the question whether or not this something that we
call life, or life-force, may not slumber in matter in the same way; but
the secret of its development we have not yet learned, as we have that
of electricity.

Radio-activity is uninfluenced by external conditions; hence we are thus
far unable to control it. Nothing that is known will effect the
transmutation of one element into another. It is spontaneous and
uncontrollable. May not life be spontaneous in the same sense?

The release of the energy associated with the structure of the atoms is
not available by any of our mechanical appliances. The process of
radio-activity involves the expulsion of atoms of helium with a velocity
three hundred times greater than that ever previously known for any
material mass or particle, and this power we are incompetent to use. The
atoms remain unchanged amid the heat and pressure of the laboratory of
nature. Iron and oxygen and so forth remain the same in the sun as here
on the earth.

Science strips gross matter of its grossness. When it is done with it,
it is no longer the obstructive something we know and handle; it is
reduced to pure energy--the line between it and spirit does not exist.
We have found that bodies are opaque only to certain rays; the X-ray
sees through this too too solid flesh. Bodies are ponderable only to our
dull senses; to a finer hand than this the door or the wall might offer
no obstruc