Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews. V. 1-2

part continued as a motion of their ultimate particles. It is this

latter motion, taken up by the aether, and propagated through it with a velocity of 186,000 miles a second, that comes to us as the light and heat of suns and stars. The atoms of a hot body swing with inconceivable rapidity--billions of times in a second--but this power of vibration necessarily implies the operatio...