Energy and Radiation Theory. 71 



manner throughout many atoms. This phenomenon would 

 be svmbolized by the fact that if we continued to watch the 

 projection of our point on the above set of planes, it would, 

 after a time, begin to lose the regularity of its form in some 

 of the projections. Projections on other coordinate planes not 

 originally associated with the atom in question, and which 

 possibly before showed no deflniteness in shape, would, how- 

 ever, begin to acquire such deflniteness, of a kind similar to 

 that lost by the projections above mentioned. In this way 

 the practical permanence of the system in its general charac- 

 teristics would be symbolized, and it will be seen that the 

 maintenance of such permanence of the identity of one kind 

 of material does not require that the representative point for 

 the system shall remain near one spot in the generalized 

 space, or even that it shall trace a re-entrant path. Indeed, 

 there is nothing to prevent the very long (in the generalized 

 sense) path which the point traces as the representative of, 

 say, copper, from ultimately merging into a path corre- 

 sponding to a normal state *, the slow transition towards 

 this state corresponding physically to a gradual transmuta- 

 tion of the copper to elements of lower atomic weight by 

 radioactive change and so on, down to the condition where 

 all atomic structure was eventually lost, and there remained 

 only chaotic motions of the electrons or other entities, what- 

 ever they be, which form the fundamental bricks out of 

 which matter is composed. In case it may be considered 

 that the infinite improbability of any state other than the 

 normal state makes it remarkable that there should be any 

 structure in matter at all, we may remark that this point 

 involves the question of how the matter was created, and we 

 may even go to the length of pointing out that it is only 

 during the comparatively rare period that matter may on 

 the above argument be considered to exist as such, that 

 there will be found those specialized pieces of matter called 

 human beings to study it. 



Although in the above remarks radiation has not been 

 specifically mentioned, there is nothing to limit the funda- 

 mentals of the arguments to the case where radiation is 

 absent. 



Consequences of Equipartition. 



The foregoing section forms a criticism of the statement 

 that the " ordinary dynamics " necessitates equipartition of 



* This has nothing whatever to do with the question of the slow 

 approach to the normal .state as discussed by Jeans (Phil. Mag', vol. x. 

 (190o) p. 91) for the case of radiation. 



