2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 65 



PART I. INTRODUCTORY 

 §1. General Remarks 



The non-electrical bond between atoms, such as may be supposed 

 to exist in the Hydrogen molecule, is an important factor in chemical 

 union; but no plausible suggestion as to its nature has ever been 

 made, and the failure to account for this bond is one of the greatest 

 defects of the electronic theory of matter as it now stands. 



Now the present theory is the outcome of an attempt made some 

 years ago to remedy this defect even at the expense of a considerable 

 departure from accepted fundamental ideas : it seemed then to the 

 author that the idea of replacing the classical electron by the mag- 

 neton here described, which makes the bond in question magnetic, 

 was less revolutionary than any other that could definitely attain the 

 end in view ; and the contents of this paper bear witness to its 

 subsequent fertility. 



In postulating this magneton for chemical reasons, the phenomena 

 of magnetism and radiation were of course not lost sight of. In 

 the field of magnetism, the magneton has been at once and automatic- 

 ally as strikingly successful as in chemistry — as indeed we ought to 

 require it to be. As regards its application to the phenomena of 

 radiation, not much can be said at present ; but the magneton seems 

 a priori a promising conception here, and its possibilities have been 

 looked into already by Dr. D. L. Webster in a paper on " Planck's 

 Radiation Formula and the Classical Electrodynamics " (Amer. 

 Acad., Jan., 1915). 



As might be expected of a theory that had such an origin, the special 

 considerations which led to the theory of Rutherford and Bohr, for 

 example, were not taken into account; and thus any representation 

 that it has been or will be able to give of the phenomena of a-particle 

 scattering, of spectrum series, of the Rontgen ray spectra, or of the 

 mass of the atom, are necessarily of a supplementary nature: but 

 the theory does not, I believe, exclude the possibility of such repre- 

 sentation for any of these phenomena (see the note in §16). 



The properties of atoms fall into two distinct classes, the nature 

 of this distinction having been clearly defined by J. J. Thomson, who 

 points out that the atom behaves as if it were made up of a few 

 electrons in an " outer shell " which are responsible for the chemi- 

 cal and light-absorbing properties of the atoms, surrounding a 

 dense central mass made up of other electrons and positive elec- 

 tricity which might be called the " core " of the atom and is the seat 

 of the strictly additive properties such as the mass, the Rontgen ray 



