ELECTRICAL MEASUREMENT. 437 



you may suppose the walls of the room to be 

 metallic, so that we may have no confusion owing 

 to the imperfect conductors then by means of 

 this very fine wire connecting the insulated globe 

 with the walls of the room, the globe instantly 

 loses its electricity. By instantly^ I mean in such 

 a short time as it would be impossible to measure 

 by any method we could apply I mean a time as 

 small as, say, one-millionth of a second the globe 

 would lose its electricity, if we had connected it 

 to the walls of the room by ten or twenty 

 yards of the finest wire we could imagine. Now 

 suppose the wire a million times finer (if we 

 can suppose that) than we can apply, the same 

 thing would happen, but in a correspondingly 

 longer time. Or take a cotton thread, and 

 suspend by means of it such a globe as I 

 have been imagining, surrounded with metallic 

 walls ; that moist cotton thread will gradually 

 diselectrify it ; in a quarter of a minute the 

 globe will have lost perhaps half its electricity 

 in another quarter half of the remainder, and so 

 on. If the resistance of the conductor I have 



