[{II.} EXPERIMENTS ON THE CHARGES OF BODIES.] 



[From MS. N 03 . 9 and 10: apparently prepared for publication. 

 See Table of Contents at the beginning of this volume.] 



236] The intention of the remaining experiments was to find out the 

 proportion which the quantity of redundant fluid in bodies of several 

 different shapes and sizes would bear to each other if placed at a con- 

 siderable distance from each other and connected together by a slender 

 wire, or, which comes to the same thing, to find the proportion which the 

 quantity of redundant fluid in them would bear to each other if they 

 were successively connected by a slender wire to a third body placed at 

 a great distance from them, supposing the quantity of redundant fluid in 

 the third body to be the same each time; and to examine how far that 

 proportion agrees with what it should be by theory if the bodies were 

 connected by canals of incompressible fluid. 



237] To avoid circumlocution I shall frequently in the following pages 

 make use of a term the meaning of which is given in the following definition. 



DEF. When in relating any experiment in which two bodies B and b 

 were successively connected to a third body and overcharged, I say that 

 the charge of B was found to be to that of b as P to i, I mean that the 

 quantity of redundant fluid in B would have been to that in b in the above 

 proportion, provided the quantity of redundant fluid in the third body 

 was exactly the same each time, everything else being exactly the same 

 as in the experiment, that is, the bodies being situated exactly as in the 

 experiment. But when I say simply that the charge of one body is to that 

 of another in any particular proportion, for instance, when I say that the 

 charge of a thin circular plate is to that of a globe of the same diameter 

 as i to 1-57, I would be understood to mean that if the circular plate and 

 globe are successively connected to a third body by a thin wire the re- 

 dundant fluid in the plate would be to that in the globe in that proportion, 

 provided they were placed at a very great distance both from the third 

 body and from any other over- or undercharged matter, and that the 

 quantity of redundant fluid in the third body was exactly the same each 

 time. 



238] The method I took in making these experiments was by com- 

 paring each of the two bodies I wanted to examine, or B and 6 as I shall 

 call them, one after another with a third body, which I shall call the trial 

 plate, in this manner. I took two Leyden vials and charged both of them 

 from the same conductor; I then electrified B positively by the inside of 

 one of the vials, and at the same time electrified the trial plate negatively 

 by the coating of the other vial. Having done this I tried whether the 



