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INVENTIONS OF NIKOLA TESLA.

spirit of positive scientific investigation, seeks to ascertain thecauses of the effects. It is principally the natural philospher,the physicist, for whom the eye is the subject of the most intenseadmiration.

Two facts about the eye must forcibly impress the mind of thephysicist, notwithstanding he may think or say that it is animperfect optical instrument, forgetting, that the very conceptionof that which is perfect or seems so to him, lias been gainedthrough this same instrument. First, the eye is, as far as ourpositive knowledge goes, the only organ which is directly affectedby that subtile medium, which as science teaches us, must fill allspace ; secondly, it is the most sensitive of our organs, incompar-ably more sensitive to external impressions than any other.

The organ of hearing implies the impact of ponderable bodies,the organ of smell the transference of detached material particles,and the organs of taste, and of touch or force, the direct contact,or at least some interference of ponderable matter, and this istrue even in those instances of animal organisms, in which someof these organs are developed to a degree of truly marvelousperfection. This being so, it seems wonderful that the organ ofsight solely should be capable of being stirred by that, which allour other organs are powerless to detect, yet which plays an es-sential part in all natural phenomena, which transmits all energyand sustains all motion and, that most intricate of all, life, butwhich has properties such that even a scientifically trained mindcannot help drawing a distinction between it and all that is calledmatter. Considering merely this, and the fact that the eye, byits marvelous power, widens our otherwise very narrow range ofperception far beyond the limits of the small world which is ourown, to embrace myriads of other worlds, suns and stars in theinfinite depths of the universe, would make it justifiable to assert,that it is an organ of a higher order. Its performances are beyondcomprehension. Nature as far as we know never produced any-thing more wonderful. We can get barely a faint idea of itsprodigious power by analyzing what it does and by comparing.When ether waves impinge upon the human body, they producethe sensations of warmth or cold, pleasure or pain, or perhaps othersensations of which we are not aware, and any degree or intensityof these sensations, which degrees are infinite in number, hence aninfinite number of distinct sensations. But our sense of touch, orour sense of force, cannot reveal to us these diffierences in degree