CLASSICAL AND NEW MECHANICS 161 



radiant energy was undoubtedly of the same type as 

 light and heat; then it was found that no material 

 ether could be imagined which would perform these 

 new duties, especially as it was already staggering 

 under the burdens of the old ones. Faraday proposed 

 as a substitute, that we should no longer imagine the 

 medium to be a substance having material or mechani- 

 cal properties, but one responding to electrical and 

 magnetic actions. He was far in advance of his time 

 and to be acceptable the hypothesis needed the mathe- 

 matical development which was so skillfully accom- 

 plished by Maxwell. Both Faraday and Maxwell, 

 while really destroying the material nature of the ether, 

 strove to maintain at least a partial connection between 

 electro-magnetic and mechanical attributes. For this 

 reason they supposed that electro-magnetic stresses 

 manifested themselves by creating mechanical strains in 

 the ether and in matter immersed in it. Such strains 

 must produce actual physical deformations of size and 

 shape in all electrified bodies. It has been shown ex- 

 perimentally by the writer that such deformations are 

 not produced in electrified matter and lately Professor 

 Lorentz has stated, that since Helmholtz proved these 

 stresses would cause the medium to move, and since no 

 experiment has ever shown us a trace of a motion in the 

 ether, we must deny the real existence of such stresses. 

 The effect of such a denial is to separate all attributes 

 of the ether from concrete realities and to class them 



