gate volumes of the liquids mixed. But, waiving this, as well as the phenomena which emerge in the processes of solution and chemical action, it must be said that experience does not in any manner vouch for the impenetrability of matter as such in all its states of aggregation. When gases are subjected to pressure, the result is simply an increase of the expansive force in proportion to the pressure exerted, according to the law of Boyle and Mariotte (the modifications of and apparent exceptions to which, as exhibited in the experimental results obtained by Regnault and others, need not here be stated, because they do not affect the argument). A definite experimental limit is reached in the case of those gases only in which the pressure produces liquefaction or solidification. The most significant phenomenon, however, which experience contributes to the testimony on this subject is the diffusion of gases. Whenever two or more gases which do not act upon each other chemically are introduced into a given space, each gas diffuses itself in this space as though it were alone present there; or, as Dalton, the reputed father of the modern atomic theory, expresses it, "Gases are mutually passive, and pass into each other as into vacua."
Whatever reality may correspond to the notion of the impenetrability of matter, this impenetrability is not, in the sense of the atomists, a datum of experience.
Upon the whole, it would seem that the validity of the first proposition of the atomic theory is not sustained by the facts. Even if the assumed unchangeability of the supposed ultimate constituent particles of matter presented itself, upon its own showing, as more than a bare reproduction of an observed fact in the form of an hypothesis, and could be dignified with the name of a generalization or of a theory, it would still be obnoxious to the criticism that it is a generalization from facts crudely observed and imperfectly apprehended.
In this connection it may be observed that the atomic theory has become next to valueless as an explanation of the impenetrability of matter, since it has been pressed into the service of the undulatory theory of light, heat, etc., and assumed the form in which it is now held by the majority of physicists, as we shall presently see. According to this form of the theory, the atoms are either mere points, wholly without extension, or their dimensions are infinitely small as compared with the distances between them, whatever be the state of aggregation of the substances into which they enter. In this view the resistance which a body, i. e., a system of atoms, offers to the intrusion of another body is due, not to the rigidity or unchangeability of volume of the individual atoms, but to the relation between the attractive and repulsive forces with which they are supposed to be endowed. There are physicists holding this view who are of opinion that the atomic constitution of matter is consistent with its impenetrability—among them M. Cauchy, who, in his Sept Leçons de Phy-
