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use of a lever, and also from a consideration of various problems connected with the weights of bodies. It was finally put on its true basis at the end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth centuries, as the preceding account shows, partly with the view of explaining the theory of falling bodies, but chiefly in order to give a scientific theory of planetary motions. But since those days dynamics has taken upon itself a more ambitious task, and now claims to be the ultimate science of which the others are but branches. The claim amounts to this: namely, that the various qualities of things perceptible to the senses are merely our peculiar mode of appreciating changes in position on the part of things existing in space. For example, suppose we look at Westminster Abbey. It has been standing there, grey and immovable, for centuries past. But, according to modern scientific theory, that greyness, which so heightens our sense of the immobility of the building, of itself nothing but our way of appreciating the rapid motions of the ultimate molecules, which form the outer surface of the building and communicate vibrations to a substance called the ether. Again we lay our hands on its stones and note their cool, even temperature, so symbolic of the quiet repose of the building. But this feeling of temperature simply marks our sense of the transfer of

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