ABSTRACT
The earth, for instance, is moving along its orbit at the rate of eighteen miles a second; and yet the ether does not pile up in front of it, nor is it made rarer in the wake of the earth. The vast fund of energy that daily comes streaming to us from the sun it transmuted back and forth in a thousand ways, though little by little it is dissipated off into space, and we are dependent upon a fresh supply from the ever replenished fountain. Since these record-making experiments by Joule, the matter has been verified over and over again in all sorts of ways; and almost every kind of display of energy has been measured with more or less exactness. The theory of the luminiferous ether as the medium of the transmission of light is one of these pretentious bridges of words.
