NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



as possessing the properties of an electrified body ; 

 brief, surrounded by or charged with an electron. 

 Then are what we, in our ignorance, term mat- 

 ter and electricity, so indissolubly bound up to- 

 gether that they are to all intents one and the 

 same? 



That is how it looks now. The chemist's atom, 

 in the new view, becomes but an aggregation of 

 electrified corpuscles. The mass of the latter is but 

 a thousandth part of that of the lightest of atoms 

 that of hydrogen; but a hundred- thousandth part 

 of that of an atom of silver or gold. Clusters of 

 these corpuscles, varying in number and arrange- 

 ment, but absolutely identical among themselves, 

 build up the different kinds of matter the eighty 

 or ninety " elements" known to the chemist. The 

 corpuscles, in a word, constitute primal matter; 

 they are the stuff of which all existing things a 

 starfish or a planet, a music-box or a mummy- 

 are made. 



On the other hand, the electrician is invited 

 to see in the passage of a ten-thousand-kilowatt 

 current but a drift, or rather a rush, at incredible 

 speeds, of these corpuscles or, if you prefer, elec- 

 trons along a wire. It is rather staggering, but 

 the drift may be swift. Professor Thomson calcu- 

 lates the speed of the corpuscles in a Crookes tube 

 at rather more than fifty thousand miles per second 



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