TO PROFESSOR LEWIS CAMPBELL.

                                                       Glenlair, Dalbeattie, 26th September 1874.

     Yours of the 29th instant is to hand. Whether your devotion to Michael Angelo has urged you to anticipate his    day, or whether Time gallops with those who sit to view Necessity, with her weary pund o' tow massed round her   rock, being all the remains of the stane o' lint with which she was originally endowed, those who may be set to construe this sentence will be apt to lose much time.

     With regard to atoms, I am preparing a hash of them for Baynes of the Britannica. The easiest way of showing   what atoms can't do is to get some sort of notion of what they can do. If atoms are finite in number, each of them   being of a certain weight, then it becomes impossible that the germ from which a man is developed should contain   (actually, of course, not potentially, for potentiality is nonsense in materialism unless it is expressed as configuration  and motion) gemmules of everything which the man is to inherit, and by which he is differentiated from other     animals and men,—his father's temper, his mother's memory, his grandfather's way of blowing his nose, his    arboreal ancestor's arrangement of hair on his arms, and his more remote littoral ancestor's devotion to the    tide-swaying moon. Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men's hobbies to death, has    invented the felicitous expression "structureless germs." Now, if a germ, or anything else, contains in itself a power    of development into some distinct thing, and if this power is purely physical, arising from the configuration and   motion of parts of the germ, it is nonsense to call it structureless because the microscope does not show the
     structure; the germ of a rat must contain more separable parts and organs than there are drops in the sea. But if   we are sure that there are not more than a few million molecules in it, each molecule being composed of  component molecules, identical with those of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., there is no room left for   the sort of structure which is required for pangenesis on purely physical principles. Again, suppose that a great    many individual atoms take part in a disturbance in my brain, to whom does this signify anything? As for the    atoms, they have been in far worse rows before they became naturalized in my brain, but they forget the days    before, etc.. At any rate the atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is    strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling.

     In your letter you apply the word imponderable to a molecule. Don't do that again. It may also be worth knowing    that the æther cannot be molecular. If it were, it would be a gas, and a pint of it would have the same properties as   regards heat, etc., as a pint of air, except that it would not be so heavy.

     Under what form (right or light) can an atom be imagined? Bezonian! speak or die! Now I must go to post with   two dogs in the rain. Your afft.       friend