Science for the School and Family, Part I. Natural Philosophy

by Worthington Hooker

A soap-bubble is a beautiful example of the minute division of matter. That thin wall which incloses the air which you have blown into it is composed of particles of the soap and of the water mingled together. It is supposed to be less than one millionth of an inch in thickness.

The thread of the silk-worm is so minute that the finest sewing-silk is formed of many of these threads twisted together. But the spider spins much more finely than this. The thread by which you see him letting himself down from any height is made up of about 6000 threads or filaments, each coming from a separate hole in his spinning machine. A quarter of an ounce of the thread of a spider's web would extend 400 miles.

A grain of blue vitriol, dissolved in a gallon of water, will make the whole blue. Such a diffusion could not be without an exceedingly minute division of the particles.

Perhaps the most minute division of matter is exemplified in odors. A grain of musk will scent a room for years, and yet have no perceptible loss of weight. But all this time the air is filled with fine particles coming from the musk.

The microscope reveals to us many wonderful examples of the minuteness of the particles of matter, both in the vegetable and the animal world.

If you press a common puff-ball a dust flies off like smoke. Examined with a microscope, each particle of this dust, which is the seed of the plant, is a perfectly round orange-colored ball. This ball is of course made up of very many particles, arranged in this regular form. Beautiful examples of various arrangements of the minute particles of matter we have in the pollen of different plants, as seen with the microscope.

Each particle of the dust which adheres to your fingers as you catch a moth is a scale with fine lines upon it regularly arranged. And if you look through the microscope at the wing of the moth, you will see, where the dust is rubbed off, the attachments by which the scales were held standing up from the surface of the wing, like nail-heads on a roof where the shingles have been torn off.

The organization of exceedingly small animals, as revealed by the microscope, furnishes us with wonderful examples of the minute division of matter. A little of the dust of guano, examined through a powerful microscope, is seen to contain multitudes of shells of various shapes. These shells are the remains of animalcules that lived in the water, their destiny seeming to be in part to furnish food to other animals larger than themselves. In the chalk formations of the earth are seen multitudes of such shells. They have been discovered even in the glazing of a visiting-card; for they are so small that the fine grinding up of the chalk does not wholly destroy them. There are animals, both in the air and in the water, so small that it would take millions of them to equal in bulk a gram of sand, and a thousand of them could swim side by side through the eye of a common-sized needle. Now in all these animals there are organs, constructed of particles of matter, which are arranged in them with as much order and symmetry as in the organs of our bodies. How minute then must these particles be!

How do such facts extend our views of the power of the Deity! The same power that moulded the earth, sun, moon, and the whole "host of heaven," gave form, and life, and motion to the millions which sport in every sunbeam; the same eye that watches the immense heavenly bodies as they move on in their course, looks upon one and all of these legions of animals in earth, air, and water, though they are unseen by human eyes, seeing that every particle shall take its right position, so that this part of creation may with all the rest be pronounced very good; and the same bountiful hand that dispenses the means of life and enjoyment to the millions of the human race, forgets not to minister to the brief life and enjoyment of each one of these myriads of animalcules, though they seem to be almost nothingness itself.

20. Pores and Spaces in Matter.—In all matter there are spaces about the particles. Those bodies which are called porous have quite large spaces in them. But even in those which are not commonly considered porous the particles are by no means close together. A celebrated experiment tried in Florence a long time ago showed that there are spaces among the particles of so dense a substance as gold sufficiently large to let water through them. A hollow golden globe containing water was subjected to great pressure, and its surface was bedewed with the water that came out through the pores of the gold. In all substances in which there are pores visible to the naked eye, or by the aid of the microscope, there are other spaces or interstices among the particles around the pores. Indeed, it is supposed that there is space around every ultimate particle or atom, and that no two of these atoms are in actual contact. The fact that substances which have no pores can be compressed into a smaller space than they usually occupy shows that there are spaces or interstices in them. Solids can be thus compressed, some more than others. But the most compressible substances are the gases and vapors. The amount of space between their particles must be very large to allow of so great compression.