1 6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 65 



it would require a value of v somewhat greater than c for coalescence. 

 (It should be said that the cases v — c and v>c do not here violate the 

 law of relativity, for the continuous distribution of the charge around 

 the magneton ensures it a uniform field for all values of v.) 



Now it will be shown in §6 that if the magnetic forces between 

 magnetons are to be great enough to account for chemical actions 

 satisfactorily, v must not be much less than c. It is simplest, there- 

 fore, to assume v to be equal to c. We can neglect the mutual' induc- 

 tion between magnetons approaching one another, as, for magnetons 

 that are far from coalescing, these will be small ; even if two coa- 

 lesced, the flux per magneton would only be halved. 



Turning now to the phenomena of chemical combination, we find 

 that the bond in the H 2 molecule, which presents such difficulties to 

 electrostatic theories, is the simplest of all to explain. It may be 

 attributed to the magnetic attraction between two electrically neutral 

 atoms containing one magneton apiece. Diagrammatically, the H 



atom may be represented : [ c ) ? j ; and the H 2 molecule 



f <tM <=^ J or I These two con- 



figurations are equally satisfactory from a chemical point of view, 

 but magnetically their properties would be very different.) The mag- 

 netons are pulled away from the centers of their positive spheres, 

 and the fact that the H 2 molecule does not combine with more H 

 atoms is accounted for by the obstructing action of the positive 

 spheres, which prevent other magnetons from coming as close to 

 these two magnetons as they are to one another. But residual mag- 

 netic forces remain, and would account, always for a part, and 

 sometimes for almost the whole, of those actions between molecules 

 and parts of molecules which are not indicated in structural formulae 

 and which find their most general expression in the phenomena of 

 cohesion (§§n, 16). (For a calculation of the heat of dissociation 

 of the H 2 molecule from this model, see §18.) 



, Before proceeding to the study of atoms containing more than one 

 magneton, it may be well to point out that, although the fundamental 

 concepts of this theory, the magneton. and the positive sphere, are in 



