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10 A letter to Prof. Faraday. 
what other cause than an intense affinity between it and the 
metallic particles with which it is associated, can its confinement 
be ascribed consistently with your estimate of the enormous 
- quantity which exists in metals? If “a grain of water, or a grain 
zine, contain as much of the electric fluid as would supply 
~ eight hundred thousand charges of a battery containing a coated 
surface of fifteen hundred square inches,” how intense must be 
the attraction by which this matter is confined? In such eases ~ 
may not the material cause of electricity be considered as latent sq 
agreeably to the suggestion of CErsted, the founder of electro- t 
magnetism. It is in combination with matter, and only capable 
of producing the appropriate effects of voltaic currents when in 
act of transfer from combination with one atom to another; this 
transfer being at once an effect and a cause of chemical decomipe f 
sition, as you have demonstrated. 2 
If polarization in any form, can be conceived to admit of the © 
requisite gradations of intensity, which the phenomena seem to — 
demand ; would it not be more reasonable to suppose that it ope- 
rates bg means of an imponderable fluid existing throughout alt 
space, however devoid of other matter? May not an electric cur- 
‘rent, so called, be a progressive polarization of rows of the electric 
particles, the polarity being produced at one end and destroyed at 
the other incessantly, as I understood you to suggest in the case 
of contiguous ponderable atoms. 
When the electric particles within different wires are polarized 
in the same tangential direction, the opposite poles being in prox- 
imity, there will be attraction. When the currents of polariza- 
tion move oppositely, similar poles coinciding, there will be 
repulsion. The phenomena require that the magnetized or polar- 
ized particles should be arranged as tangents to the circumference, 
not as radii to the axis. Moreover, the progressive movement 
must be propagated in spiral lines in order to account for rotary 
influence. 
Between a wire which is the mean of a galvanic discharge and 
another not making a part of a circuit, the electric matter which 
intervenes may, by undergoing a polarization, become the medium 
of producing a progressive polarization in the second wire moving 
in a direction opposite to that in the inducing wire; or in other 
words an electrical current of the species called Faradian may Bs 
generated. 
4 es oa 
