ON THE PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 



191 



osophers, revealed a large array of strange and startling 

 phenomena, which have latterly been brought somewhat 

 into line and order by the researches of Prof. J. J. Thom- 

 son, 1 of Cambridge. A great many half -forgotten facts 

 and experiments, which did not fit into the regular pro- 

 gramme of electrical science or practice as it had been 

 elaborated by the older doctrine of Coulomb and Weber 

 on the one side, or by the more modern of Faraday and 

 Maxwell on the other, were collected and shown to 

 throw quite a new light on the processes of radiation 

 and electrification, and on the relations of the atoms of 

 ponderable matter to the vacuum, now looked upon as 

 filled with a continuous substance, viz., the ether. The 

 older views of the two electricities, brought before 

 the eye by the celebrated figures of Lichtenberg ; 2 

 many isolated facts connected with the electric spark 

 and statical electricity, such as were collected by Eiess 

 seventy years ago, or demonstrated in the hydro-electric 

 machine of Armstrong ; theories, many times abandoned 



1 Impressed with the importance 

 which attaches to the phenomena in 

 question for a further development 

 of the theory of electricity founded 

 by Faraday and Maxwell, Prof. J. J. 

 Thomson, in his ' Researches,' pub- 

 lished in 1 893 as a sequel to Max- 

 well's great treatise, devoted a 

 long chapter to "The Passage of 

 Electricity through Gases." His 

 own celebrated contributions to 

 this subject, after having been 

 published in the ' Philosophical 

 Magazine,' and brought before the 

 Dover meeting of the British As- 

 sociation in 1899, are now summar- 

 ised in his lectures on "The Dis- 

 charge of Electricity through Gases" 

 (1898). A very interesting earlier 

 summary of the researches of 



others as well as of their own by 

 Elster and Geitel, will be found in 

 the 'Annalen der Physik ' (1889), 

 vol. xxxvii. p. 315 sqq. 



2 Whilst the differences between 

 the discharges from the positive and 

 negative terminals, after having 

 for a long time been looked upon 

 as isolated curiosities of electrical 

 science, were being taken up and 

 studied in connection with the 

 subject here referred to (see J. J. 

 Thomson, 'Researches,' p. 172 sqq.), 

 Lord Armstrong, during the past 

 ten years of his long and eventful 

 life, carried on a series of experi- 

 ments on a large scale, and with 

 very powerful specially designed 

 apparatus, on ' Electrical Discharge 

 in Air and Water ' (1895). 



