ARE THE ELEMENTS TRAN SMUT ABLE? 47 



give us values which enable us to make such comparisons as the follow- 

 ing, suggested by Sir Oliver Lodge : ' The corpuscle is so small as com- 

 pared to the atom that it, within the atom, may be likened to a mouse 

 in a cathedral,' or ' the corpuscle is to the whole atom as the earth and 

 other planets are to the whole solar system.' 



These corpuscles are probably gyrating about each other, or about 

 some common center, with velocities approaching that of light. It 

 seems needful to suppose this, for it is hard to imagine that the 

 enormous velocities observed could be imparted to a corpuscle at the 

 instant it leaves the atom to become a constituent of a cathode ray. 

 It is more reasonable to imagine that the corpuscle already had this 

 velocity and that it flew off at a tangent owing to some influence we do 

 not understand. 



This may appear, after all, to be little more than pushing back our 

 questions one stage, so that the position occupied in our thoughts but 

 yesterday by the atom is now occupied by the corpuscle. Quite true, 

 but this is in itself a great step, for the advancement of knowledge 

 consists of nothing else than such pushing back of the boundaries. We 

 dare not assume the end is reached, for there is no proof that the 

 corpuscles are ultimate. They mark the present limit of our imagin- 

 ings based on experiment, but no one can say but what the next cen- 

 tury may possibly witness the shattering of the corpuscles into as many 

 parts as it now appears to take to make an atom. 



The question is a legitimate one, do we know any more about these 

 ' new-fangled ' corpuscles than we did about the old atoms ? The 

 answer is, yes, we probably do. We can go further in our reasoning 

 on the basis of the properties of the corpuscles, and arrive at results 

 which are startling when heard for the first time. 



Lenard 7 has shown that the absorption of cathode rays by different 

 substances is simply proportional to the specific gravity of those sub- 

 stances and independent of their chemical properties. It is even 

 independent of the condition of aggregation, i. e., whether the absorb- 

 ing substance be investigated as a gas, as a liquid or as a solid. This 

 is another strong argument in favor of the view that there is but one 

 ' mother substance ' which consists of corpuscles. The corpuscles of 

 the cathode rays must be considered as passing unimpeded through the 

 interstices between the corpuscles of the atom. Lenard calls the cor- 

 puscles dynamides and considers them as fields of electrical force with 

 impenetrable central bodies which then constitute actual matter. He 

 calculates the diameter of this center of actual matter as smaller than 

 0.3 X 10- 10 (= 0.000,000,000,03) millimeter. Applying these results 

 to the case of the metal platinum, one of the most dense of the metals, 

 one of those with the highest specific gravity, he concludes that a solid 



T Wied. Anna!., 5G, p. 255 (1895), and Dntdes Annul., 12, 714 (1903). 



