"Just now, however, Wirbelbewegungen (vortex motions) have displaced everything else, since a few days ago Peter Guthrie Tait showed me in Edinburgh a magnificent way of producing them ... The absolute permanence of the rotation ... in a perfect fluid, shows that if there is a perfect fluid all through Space, constituting the substance of all matter, a vortex ring would be as permanent as the solid hard atoms assumed by Lucretius and his followers (and predecessors) to account for the permanent properties of bodies (as gold, lead, etc.) and the differences of their characters. Thus if two vortex rings were once created in a perfect fluid, passing through one another like links in a chain, they could never come into collision, or break one another, they would form an indestructible atom; every variety of combinations might exist ... a long chain of vortex rings ... three rings, each running through each of the other." Thomson

Figure 5.12 - Peter Guthrie Tait (click to enlarge)

Figure 5.13 - Babbitt Atom (as a Beating Heart) constructed of Compound Vortexial Motions. (click to enlarge)