120 Professor Frederick Soddy [May 18, 



More slowly appreciated, and not yet perhaps sufficiently empha- 

 sized, was the unparalleled intensity of these charges in comparison 

 with anything that electrical science can show, which can he 

 expressed tritely by the statement that the charge on a milligram 

 of hydrogen ions would raise the potential of the world 100,000 

 volts. Or, if we consider another aspect, and calculate how many 

 free hydrogen ions you could force into a bottle without bursting it, 

 provided, of course, that you could do so without discharging the 

 ions, you would find that, were the bottle of the strongest steel, the 

 breech of gun, for example, it would burst, by reason of the mutual 

 repulsion of the charges, before as much was put in as would, in 

 the form of hydrogen gas, show the spectrum of the element in a 

 vacuum tube. 



Then came the fundamental advances in our knowledge of the 

 nature of electricity, its isolation as the electron, or atom of negative 

 electricity, the great extension of the conception of ions to explain 

 the conduction of electricity through gases, the theoretical reasoning, 

 due in part to Heaviside, that the electron must possess inertia 

 inversely proportional to the diameter of the sphere on which it is 

 concentrated by reason of the electro-magnetic principles discovered 

 by Faraday, leading to the all-embracing monism that all mass may 

 be of electro-magnetic origin. 



This put the coping-stone to the conclusion that the elements as 

 we apprehend them in ordinary matter are always compounds In 

 the "free" state they are compounds of the element in multiple 

 atomic proportions with the electron. The ions, which are the real 

 chemically uncombined atoms of matter, can no more exist free in 

 quantity than can the electrons. 



The compound may be individual as between the atom and the 

 electron, or it may be statistical, affecting the total number merely 

 of the opposite charges, and the element presumably will be an 

 insulator or conductor of electricity accordingly. Analogously, with 

 compounds, the former condition applies to unionised compounds 

 such as are met with in the domain of organic chemistry, or ionised, 

 as in the important classes of inorganic compounds, the acids, bases 

 and salts. Just as the chemist has long regarded the union of 

 hydrogen and chlorine as preceded by the decomposition of the 

 hydrogen and chlorine molecule, so he should now further regard 

 the union itself as a decomposition of the hydrogen atom into the 

 positive ion and the negative electron, and a combination of the 

 latter with the chlorine atom. 



One of the barriers to the proper understanding and quantitative 

 development of chemical character from this basis is, perhaps, the 

 conventional idea derived from electrostatics, that opposite electric 

 charges neutralise one another. In atomic electricity or chemistry, 

 though the equality of the opposite charges is a necessary condition 

 for existence, there is no such thing as neutralisation, or the elec- 



