One of the most remarkable meteors of which we have a reliable record appeared on February 6, 1818. Several accounts of it were published, the fullest being that in The Gentleman’s Magazine of the time. (I may here add, parenthetically, that one reason why I have especial pleasure in writing these notes is that they contribute something towards the restoration of the ancient status of this magazine, which was at one time the only English serial that ventured upon any notable degree of exposition of popular science.)

Upon the data supplied by this account, Mr. Joule has calculated the height of the meteor to have been 61 miles above the surface of the earth, and he states that “this meteor is one of the few that have been seen in the daytime, and is also interesting as having been one of the first whose observation afforded materials for the estimation of its altitude.” It was seen in the neighborhood of Cambridge at 2 P.M., also at Swaffham in Norfolk, and at Middleton Cheney near Banbury. The distance between this and Cambridge is sufficient to afford a measurement of its height, provided its position above the horizon at both places was determined with tolerable accuracy.

According to the orthodox text-books, the atmosphere of this earth terminates at a height of about 45 or 50 miles, or, if not absolutely ended there, it ceases to be of appreciable density anywhere above this elevation.

But here we have a fact which flatly contradicts the calculation. At 61 miles above the earth’s surface there must be atmospheric matter of sufficient density to offer to the passage of this meteor through it an amount of resistance which produced an intense white heat, visible by its luminosity in broad daylight.

In the above-quoted paper, read by Mr. Joule before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on December 1, 1863, he refers to subsequent observations and estimates 116 miles as “the elevation at which meteors in general are first observed”—i.e., where our atmosphere is sufficiently dense to generate a white-heat by the resistance it offers to the rapidly flying meteor.

It is curious to observe how, in dealing with actual physical facts, a mathematician of the solid practical character of Joule becomes compelled to practically throw overboard the orthodox theory of limited atmospheric extension. Here, in making his calculations of the resistance of atmospheric matter at this elevation, he bases them on the assumption of a decrease of density at the rate of “one quarter for every seven miles,” and indicates no limit at which this rate shall vary. Very simple arithmetic is sufficient to show that this leads us to the unlimited atmospheric extension, for which I have contended we may go on for ever taking off a quarter at every seven miles, and there will still remain the three quarters of the quantity upon which we last operated, or, more practically stated, we shall thus go on seven after seven until we reach the boundaries of the atmospheric grasp of the gravitation of some other sphere.

Surely the time has arrived for the full reconsideration of this fundamental question of whether the universe is filled with atmospheric matter or is the vacuum of the molecular mathematicians plus the imaginary “ether,” which has been invented by its mathematical creators only to extricate them from the absurd dilemma into which they are plunged when they attempt to explain the transmission of light and heat by undulations traveling through space containing nothing to undulate.

They have filled it with immaterial matter evolved entirely from their own consciousness, which they have gratuitously endowed with whatever properties are required for the fitting of their theories—properties that are self-contradictory and without any counterpart in anything seen or known outside of the fertile imagination of these reckless theorists.

We know of nothing that can penetrate every form of matter without adding either to its weight or its bulk; we know of nothing that can communicate motion to ponderable matter without itself being ponderable—i.e., having the primary property of matter, viz., mass, or weight, and consequent vis viva when moving; we know of nothing that can set bodies in motion without proportionally resisting the motion of bodies through it; and if the waving of the ether is (as Tyndall describes it) “as real and as truly mechanical as the breaking of sea-waves upon the shore,” the material of the breakers must be like the “jelly” to which he compares it, and have some viscosity, or resistance to penetration, or pushing aside.

We have not a shadow of direct evidence of the existence of the “interatomic” spaces occupied by the other, and in the midst of which the atoms are made to theoretically swing, nor even of the existence of the atoms themselves.

The “ether” of to-day, with its imaginary penetration and its material action without material properties, has merely taken the place of the equally imaginary phlogiston, caloric, electric, and magnetic fluids, the “imponderables” of the past. I have little doubt that ere long the modern modification of these physical superstitions will share their fate, and we shall all adopt the simple conception that heat, light, end electricity are, like sound, merely transmissible states or affections of matter itself regarded bodily, as it is seen and felt to exist.

This may possibly throw a good many mathematicians out of work—or into more useful work; but, however that may be, it will certainly aid the general diffusion of science as the intellectual inheritance of every human being. At present the explanations of the simple phenomena of light and heat are incomparably more difficult to understand and to account for than the facts which they attempt to elucidate.