THE SEARCH FOR PRIMAL MATTER 



having them drawn towards it, as one would nat- 

 urally think they would. 



Again, the other workers in this field see in the 

 corpuscles a possible explanation of the extraordi- 

 nary properties discovered by Professor Becquerel 

 and Madame Curie in uranium and radium, matter 

 which has the capacity to go on glowing with a 

 pale phosphorescent light, apparently forever. It 

 has been shown that these substances each and 

 all emit cathode rays that is to say, corpuscles. 

 They are all of them of a very high atomic weight, 

 and we might conceive, therefore, that the cor- 

 puscles which are thrown off represent something 

 like the Nep tunes of the system. They may be 

 supposed to be very far from the centre of at- 

 traction, and the least cause may break them off. 

 We may even conceive of substances like uranium, 

 whose bulk must be hundreds of thousands of 

 times that of the corpuscles, shooting off the lat- 

 ter spontaneously, and the puzzling action of these 

 radio-active substances would be explained. 



One is curious to know what further might lie 

 on the edge of the future. Professor Thomson has 

 tried some calculations as to what would happen 

 if these corpuscles were supposed to be whirling 

 about on their own axes, like the earth, and would 

 thus establish a magnetic field in their vicinity. 

 But nothing he has been able to work out so far 



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