206 THE AMERICAN MONTHLY [July 
meat. Flesh which has once been frozen is liable to de- 
compose more rapidly than fresh meat, since bacteria can 
more readily penetrate the loosened intermuscular tissue. 
, BIOLOGICAL NOTES. 
Atoms.—The Popular Science Monthly for August 
opens with an article entitled “On Bodies Smaller than 
Atoms,” by Professor J. J. Thomson, the successor of 
Lord Rayleigh and Maxwell in the chair of physics at 
Cambridge, who here describes for the first time in pop- 
ular language the discoveries that have made him the lead- 
ing living physicist. It seems almost incredible that he 
should not only have discovered but also weighed bodies 
smaller than atoms. Indeed most of our ideas are upset 
by this article. We are, for example, told that the ele- 
ments are all made out of particles of the same kind, and 
that Franklin was right in calling electricity a fluid. 
There are not many outside the ranks of professional stu- 
dents of science who appreciate how completely ideas re~ 
garding the constitution of the world have been altered 
by recent discoveries in electricity. We all know that the 
applications of electricity have become dominant in the 
affairs of daily life, and a few years ago the X-rays at- 
tracted general attention. The X-rays are a mere corol- 
lary to the propositions of recent electrical research. Pro- 
fessor Thomson by his brilliant experiments in the Cav- 
endish Laboratory of Cambridge University has proved 
that electricity is carried by minute particles much small- 
er than atoms and that these corpuscles, as he calls them, 
are split off from atoms. The atoms of the different ele- 
ments are all made of the same kind of corpuscles. The 
minuteness of an atom may be appreciated when we learn 
that if the atoms in’a pea became as big as a pea, the pea 
would be as big as the earth. It is certainly marvelous 
that bodies smaller than an atom can be measured. 
