Cosmos, Vol. 4

the maintenance of life. The size and shape of the Earth's body, its mass (the quantity of material parts), which—when compared with its volume—determines its density, and through this (under certain conditions) the constitution of the interior as well as the measure of attraction; these stand in a more recognizable and more mathematically treatable dependency than those which we have previously observed in the aforementioned life processes, in heat currents, the terrestrial states of electro-magnetism, or chemical metabolisms. Relationships that one is not yet able to measure quantitatively in complicated phenomena may nevertheless exist and be made probable through inductive reasoning.

Even if the two types of attraction—that which acts at perceptible distances (such as gravity original: "Schwerkraft", the gravitation of celestial bodies toward one another); and that which takes place at immeasurably small distances (molecular or contact attraction);—cannot be reduced to one and the same law in the current state of our knowledge: it is nonetheless no less believable that capillary attraction and endosmosis The movement of fluids through a membrane, essential for biological life (so important for the rising of saps and for animal and plant physiology) are just as affected by the measure of gravity and its local distribution as are electromagnetic processes and chemical metabolism. One may assume, to recall extreme conditions, that on our planet, if it had only the mass of the Moon and thus an intensity of gravity almost six times lower, the meteorological processes, the climate, the hypsometric Relating to the measurement of heights or altitudes