164 THE NEW KNOWLEDGE. 



With the next group, 60 corpuscles, the outer ring is more 

 stable because there is an additional corpuscle inside it. 

 While, therefore, it may lose corpuscles it will not do so so 

 readily as the group of 59. Hence, it will not so easily as- 

 sume the positive charge of electricity, and hence, again, it 

 will not be so electro-positive an element as the group of 59. 



61 corpuscles will be still less electro-positive than 60, and 



62 less than 61. The addition of each successive corpuscle 

 inside will make it more difficult to detach corpuscles from 

 the outer ring of 20 and will, therefore, make the atom less 

 electro-positive. Not only so, but when the total number 

 of corpuscles increases to, say, 63 the possibility of losing 

 corpuscles from the outer ring vanishes and, instead, another 

 possibility creeps in. When the stability of the atom be- 

 comes extreme one or more corpuscles of the outer ring may 

 actually lie on the surface of the atom without breaking the 

 ring. In this case the atom would receive a charge of neg- 

 ative electricity and would behave like the atom of an 

 electro-negative element. This increase in the stability of 

 the ring, and consequently in the electro-negative character 

 of its atom would go on growing until we had as many as 

 67 corpuscles where the stability of the ring would be at a 

 maximum. Sixty-seven corpuscles would result in a strongly 

 electro-negative element like chlorine. 



A great change however in the properties of the atom 

 takes place in the next group of 68 corpuscles for now the 

 number of corpuscles in the outer ring increases to 21, these 

 21 corpuscles are however only just stable, and would like 

 the outer ring of 20 in the arrangement of 59 corpuscles, 

 readily lose a corpuscle and so make the atom strongly 

 electro-positive. An atom of 68 corpuscles would therefore 

 strongly resemble the atom of 59, one of 69 would resemble 

 that of 60, 70 that of 61 and so on. The properties of the 



