NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



tube which has become so familiar as the source of 

 the Rontgen rays, Professor Crookes was led to the 

 belief that the beautiful, velvety, greenish glow in- 

 side the vacuum tube which comes when an elec- 

 tric discharge passes, is due to the incandescence of 

 tiny fragments of matter travelling at an incredible 

 speed. But many doubted. 



Professor J. J. Thomson has found a way to meas- 

 ure the speed of these particles, their weight, or 

 mass, as well in a word, to demonstrate that they 

 are real. They seem quite wonderful, too, for they 

 are the smallest things known to man, and it may 

 be that out of them the universe is made. Follow- 

 ing Newton's phraseology, Professor Thomson calls 

 them corpuscles. It is rather bewildering to be 

 told that these corpuscles may turn out to be elec- 

 tricity, matter, light, the aurora borealis, magnet- 

 ism, chemical affinity, and various other trifles, all 

 at once. 



These corpuscles have introduced an utterly new 

 conception into the domain of electricity that the 

 latter is atomic in character, or, according to the 

 new ideas, atomic in structure. In order to get at 

 some sort of a working model of the processes which 

 go on in his laboratory, the chemist was obliged to 

 resort to the notion of ultimate units of matter, 

 atoms literally, that which cannot be cut. Choos- 

 ing the lightest of the atoms that of hydrogen as 



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