CHAPTER II. ON MAGNITUDE

is yet another very remarkable phenomenon which may come into play in the case of the minutest of organisms; and this is their relation to the rays of light, as Arrhenius has told us. On the waves of a beam of light, a very minute particle (in vacuo) should be actually caught up, and carried along with an immense velocity; and this 〜radiant pressure〝 exercises its most powerful influence on bodies which (if they be of spherical form) are just about ôñ00016 mm., or ôñ16 ôç in diameter. This is just about the size, as we have seen, of some of our smallest known protozoa and bacteria, while we have some reason to believe that others yet unseen, and perhaps the spores of many, are smaller still. Now we have seen that such minute particles fall with extreme slowness in air, even at ordinary atmospheric pressures: our organism measuring ôñ16 ôç would fall but 83 metres in a year, which is as much as to say that its weight offers practically no impediment to its transference, by the slightest current, to the very highest regions of the atmosphere. Beyond the atmosphere, however, it cannot go, until some new force enable it to resist the attraction of terrestrial gravity, which the viscosity of an atmosphere is no longer at hand to oppose. But it is conceivable that our particle may go yet farther, and actually break loose from the bonds of earth. For in the upper regions of the atmosphere, say fifty miles high, it will come in contact with the rays and flashes of the Northern Lights, which consist (as Arrhenius maintains) of a fine dust, or cloud of vapour-drops, laden with a charge of negative electricity, and projected outwards from the sun. As soon as our particle acquires a charge of negative electricity it will begin to be repelled by the similarly laden auroral particles, and the amount of charge necessary to enable a particle of given size (such as our little monad of ôñ16 ôç) to resist the attraction of gravity may be calculated, and is found to be such as the actual conditions can easily supply. Finally, when once set free from the entanglement of the earth〙s {49} atmosphere, the particle may be propelled by the 〜radiant pressure〝 of light, with a velocity which will carry it.〔like Uriel gliding on a sunbeam,〔as far as the orbit of Mars in twenty days, of Jupiter in eighty days, and as far as the nearest fixed star in three thousand years! This, and much more, is Arrhenius〙s contribution towards the acceptance of Lord Kelvin〙s hypothesis that life may be, and may have been, disseminated across the bounds of space, throughout the solar system and the whole universe!