PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 



HELD AT PHILADELPHIA 

 FOR PROMOTING USEFUL KNOWLEDGE 



Vol. XLV May-September, 1906. No. 183. 



ON POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ELECTRONS. 



By H. a. LORENTZ. 

 {Read April 17, 1906.) 



The illustrious founder of our society will forever occupy a 

 prominent place in the history of physical science, not only for his 

 experimental researches in electricity and his invention of the light- 

 ning rod, but also for his theoretical views. Franklin tried to ex- 

 plain all electrical phenomena that were known in his time by means 

 of a single electric fluid, which he supposed to be present in certain 

 definite quantities in all ponderable bodies, when in their natural or 

 unelectrified state, and in larger or smaller quantities in positively 

 or negatively charged bodies. The rival doctrine was of two 

 electric fluids, which in the days before Maxwell served as the 

 foundation of the mathematical theory of electricity and which was 

 adopted by those physicists who, like Riemann, Weber and Clausius, 

 sought to account for electrostatic and electrodynamic phenomena 

 by one fundamental law for the mutual action of electric particles. 



Some twenty-five years ago the relative merits of the different 

 laws of this kind that had been proposed, especially of those of 

 Weber and Clausius, were examined by many physicists and in 

 connection with this, there was much discussion about the motion 

 of the two electricities in an electric current. Whereas, in the ap- 

 plications of Weber's law, they were generally supposed to travel 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC, XLV. 183G, PRINTED OCT. 26, I906. 



