EXPLANATION OF ELECTRICITY 



about one -third the speed of light. Professor 

 Becquerel figures that the peculiar uranium radia- 

 tions, called after him the Becquerel rays, travel at 

 twice this rate. It is but a step to imagine others 

 partaking of space with the voracity of light, and, 

 what is the same, of electricity itself. 



But this is merely a restatement, in slightly al- 

 tered terms, of Franklin's old idea. A fluid need 

 not be so grossly sensible as molasses, for example, 

 to be a something which flows. So, in the present 

 view, as water is a fluid made up of particles which, 

 in the form of vapor in the air, may be so delicate 

 as to escape our senses, so electricity is but a fluid 

 made up of particles electrons or corpuscles of 

 so extremely subtle a nature as to be sensible only 

 under conditions of extreme condensation, just as 

 the water vapor must condense to drops before we 

 become clearly aware of its presence. Such, in 

 very crude fashion, is the new view. 



Those who were reared to the ideas of Clerk- 

 Maxwell, regarding electricity as a wave-and- wob- 

 ble in the highly hypothetical ether, have not failed 

 to implant upon the new theory their collective feet. 

 The matter, however, seems hardly to demand such 

 vigorous discussion. For one may ask, in turn, 

 what is this electrically charged corpuscle, this 

 electron ? Perhaps the ether still exists, filling the 

 wavy ways, and the electron may be a sort of ether- 

 Mi 



