10 A letter to Prof. Faraday. 



what other cause than an intense affinity between it and the 

 metallic particles with which it is associated, can its confinement 

 be ascribed consistently with your estimate of the enormous 

 quantity which exists in metals ? If " a grain of water, or a grain 

 of zinc, contain as much of the electric fluid as would supply 

 eight hundred thousand charges of a battery containing a coated 

 surface of fifteen hundred square inches," how intense must be 

 the attraction by which this matter is confined ? In such cases 

 may not the material cause of electricity be considered as latent 

 agreeably to the suggestion of CErsted, the founder of electro- 

 magnetism. It is in combination with matter, and only capable 

 of producing the appropriate effects of voltaic currents when in 

 act of transfer from combination with one atom to another ; this 

 transfer being at once an effect and a cause of chemical decompo- 

 sition, as you have demonstrated. 



If polarization in any form, can be conceived to admit of the 

 requisite gradations of intensity, which the phenomena seem to 

 demand ; would it not be more reasonable to suppose that it ope- 

 rates by means of an imponderable fluid existing throughout all 

 space, however devoid of other matter ? May not an electric cur- 

 rent, so called, be a progressive polarization of rows of the electric 

 particles, the polarity being produced at one end and destroyed at 

 the other incessantly, as I understood you to suggest in the case 

 of contiguous ponderable atoms. 



When the electric particles within different wires are polarized 

 in the same tangential direction, the opposite poles being in prox- 

 imity, there will be attraction. When the currents of polariza- 

 tion move oppositely, similar poles coinciding, there will be 

 repulsion. The phenomena require that the magnetized or polar- 

 ized particles should be arranged as tangents to the circumference, 

 not as radii to the axis. Moreover, the progressive movement 

 must be propagated in spiral lines in order to account for rotary 

 influence. 



Between a wire which is the mean of a galvanic discharge and 

 another not making a part of a circuit, the electric matter which 

 intervenes may, by undergoing a polarization, become the medium 

 of producing a progressive polarization in the second wire moving 

 in a direction opposite to that in the inducing wire ; or in other 

 words an electrical current of the species called Faradian may be 

 generated. 



