60 nature's 



discharge, or go back to the neutral state, 

 when the current is broken. 



Let us now go back to the beginning of our 

 experiment. When we closed the key and es- 

 tablished the current through the wire we 

 found that a piece of iron held at right angles 

 to the wire, although not touching it, became 

 magnetic. We have already said that when 

 the circuit was open, the battery being in cir- 

 cuit, there were electrical lines of force es- 

 tablished in the ether, between the two poles 

 of the battery, and that they were gathered up 

 into the conducting wire when the circuit was 

 closed. We now find that there are other lines 

 of force of a different nature established in 

 the ether when the circuit is closed. These wo 

 call magnetic lines of force, or the magnetic; 

 field of the charged wire, and they are estab- 

 lished at right angles to the direction of the 

 current. These magnetic lines of force acting 

 through the ether from an electrically charged 

 conductor are able to break up the natural 

 molecular magnetic rings, referred to in Chap- 

 ter IV, and turn all their like poles in the 

 same direction thus making one compound 

 magnet of the iron which in the neutral 

 state consisted of millions of little natural 

 magnets whose attractions were satisfied by a 

 joining of their unlike poles. 



Most writers account for all of the phe- 

 nomena of induced currents in a second wire 



