54 
MODERN VIEWS ON ELECTRICITY AND 
MATTER. 
By Mr. G. BIRTWISTLE, M.A., B.Sc. 
October 8lh, 1907. 
Throughout the Middle Ages the efforts of philosophers 
were directed to the discovery of the magical stone — “ the 
philosopher’s stone ’’—which by its touch should transform 
the baser metals into gold, but always without success. In 
our own times the elements— gold, lead, oxygen, and so 
forth— had always been regarded as substances essentially 
different and incapable of conversion into one another. They 
were the simplest kinds of matter, out of which all other 
substances were built up ; thus a piece of sugar is built up 
of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. They knew that 
they could sub-divide a piece of matter to an apparently 
unlimited extent, each tiny piece having still the same pro- 
perties as the original lump. There was, however, a limit 
to this power of sub-division, as chemistry told them, and the 
smallest particle of an element capable of separate existence 
was called an atom, the name signifying the impossibility of 
further sub-division. A piece of lead, then, was to be looked 
upon as built up of an immense number of such atoms, with 
spaces between them, held together by their mutual attractions 
—the same kind of attraction which kept the solar system 
together, and caused the planets to revolve round the sun. 
The atoms of the seventy odd different elements — copper, 
iron, tin, oxygen, and so forth — had different weights whose 
relative values were well known. 
But, with that desire for unity and simplicity of idea 
inherent in human nature, it seemed, if one might say so, 
almost unnatural that there should be some seventy different 
kinds of atoms. Why seventy ? Why any definite number 
of fundamental substances, if they were fundamental at all ? 
They thought, and very naturally so, ought there not rather 
to be some one constituent from which all these atoms were 
constructed, the lighter ones being simpler, and the heavier 
ones more complex structures, built up from this one con- 
stituent P If this were so, the possibility of the transmutation 
