58o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and he found that the distance required for the breaking into drops 

 depended, as might be expected, on the relative densities of the liquid 

 and of the medium. Savart had shown that this natural tendency of 

 liquid columns to break into drops can be induced by a musical note 

 which synchronizes with the period of the drops. 



We can now build what is possibly a wild theory, by means of that 

 dangerous tool of philosophy: analogy. Let us imagine a bundle of 

 energy not having a free surface but forming part of a general spheri- 

 cal disturbance, striking an object having an aperture which does not 

 absorb or reflect the energy and therefore acts as a diaphragm; sup- 

 pose that a cylindrical pencil is thus formed and propagated beyond 

 the obstacle; this tube of force will have free surfaces; the analogy 

 with the behavior of liquids dictates that after a while the tube will 

 resolve itself into spherical drops and these drops we shall call atoms. 

 We have thus created atoms from corpuscles and the energy traversing 

 them ; we have given an origin to what Crookes has called an " atomic 

 fog," which is, according to the nebular hypothesis, the basis of the 

 material universe. The " atomizing " of a liquid and the shredding of 

 lead (lead- wool) by an air blast are identical in principle. 



But the hypothetical diaphragm can be used to produce quite a dif- 

 ferent atom from the spherical drops which have just been created, 

 provided the vibration be brought about before the energy, corpuscles, 

 electrons, or whatever we wish to consider them, are ejected beyond 

 the diaphragm. If a box with a hole (diaphragm) in it is filled with 

 smoke and the side opposite to the hole is given a short tap causing 

 the smoke to vibrate, a ring of smoke, a vortex ring, will be emitted, 

 with the appearance and general properties of which we are well ac- 

 quainted. A continuous motion of the smoke will not produce a ring; 

 it will produce a stream, with a skin resistance like the stream of smoke 

 in a chimney; to produce a vortex ring, a pulsation is required which 

 will emit small disks of smoke which can be thinned at the center 

 to the point of rupture by the resistance on the edges of the hole. If, 

 therefore, a tube of force pulsates or is caused to pulsate by an elastic 

 or pulsating resistance or otherwise, when it strikes the diaphragm in 

 the obstacle, a vortex atom will be produced in place of a spherical 

 atom. We have thus created the vortex atom as first proposed by Helm- 

 holtz and developed by Lord Kelvin into a theory which has stood the 

 most careful mathematical scrutiny. 



That an obstacle in the path of a stream of energy will alter that 

 energy is evident. The conversion of cathodic rays into X-rays shows 

 what impact may do. The clash of two similar or dissimilar streams 

 of energy might create spherical or vortical atoms and the relative 

 speeds and the angle of impact would influence their period of vibration. 



The radiation from disintegrating matter on this planet may go far 



