IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 53 
held above them, they will all be attracted by it and will 
arrange themselves in some definite geometrical configura- 
tion. Three floating magnets will give a triangle. Five 
magnets arrange themselves either as pentagon or as a 
quadrilateral with one magnet at the goemetrical center. 
As the number of floating magnets is increased, the figures 
will successively vary. Large numbers of magnets give 
combinations of the elementary figures. For instance, 
with three, we have a triangle; with eleven, a triangle in- 
side of an octogon; with thirty-five, the triangle appears 
again surrounded by more complex figures. Accordingly, 
it is argued by analogy that the negative corpuscles inside 
of the sphere of positive electrification arrange themselves 
in definite configurations which determine the similarities 
and differences in atoms. Any two atoms may differ greatly 
in weight which means that they differ greatly in the 
number of corpuscles they contain; yet if they should 
possess in common some elementary corpuscular configura- 
tion, they would exhibit some similarity in properties as is 
the case with lithium and sodium. 
It is impossible to do justice to this interesting theory in 
a brief discussion since its speculations are based largely on 
mathematical deductions. It might be interesting to note 
in what manner it lends itself to the explanation of some 
of the undetermined phenomena of nature. 
An example where free corpuscles are produced under 
the action of a strong electric field is seen in the Crooke’s 
tube. The so-called cathode rays are streams of negatively 
charged corpuscles expelled from the atoms of the residual 
gas in the tube. These corpuscles, as we should expect, are 
always of the same kind, no matter what the nature of the 
residual gas. We are also aware that other rays quite dif- 
ferent from the cathode rays emanate from the anode of a 
Crooke’s tube. Those from the anode consist of streams of 
atoms of the residual gas positively charged. We would 
expect the existence of such ionized atoms from the theory 
since it is evident that the forcing out of negative cor- 
puscles would leave the atom with an excess charge of 
positive electrification. 
