Annual Address by the President. 
13 
Thomson’s studies of cathode rays, strict reasoning from his careful 
experiments demonstrating them to be swarms of minute particles, 
or corpuscles, as he called them, moving with velocities approaching 
that of light, and each weighing about one eight-hundredth as much 
as a hydrogen atom. These corpuscles are not merely ordinary atoms 
of smaller bulk, for they do not obey chemical laws, it having been 
ascertained, among other things, that the absorption of them by dif- 
ferent substances is simply proportional to the latters’ specific grav- 
ity, and quite independent of their chemical properties. 
And recently the case against the atom, together with Thomson’s 
ingenious demonstration of his corpuscles, have secured an ample 
experimental foundation, thanks chiefly to the labors of Bacquerel, 
the Curries, and Rutherford and Soddy on radio-active substances. 
These wonderful experiments, at once rapid and reliable, have 
shown that radio-activity consists in the throwing off of two orders 
of substances: first, atoms; second, rays or corpuscles of various 
kinds. But the remarkable fact in the situation is, that while the 
atomic weight of the original substances, radium, thorium, or uran- 
ium, is two hundred or more, the weight of the atoms thrown off is 
nearer one or 'two. That is, radium breaks up into hydrogen or 
helium, thrown off, and the residuum after the emission, which has 
a different atomic weight from either, and is otherwise shown to be 
a distinct element. The dream of the alchemist has come true, and 
elements are transmuted before our eyes. Science has achieved an 
unsurpassed triumph! But, as far as helping us to fortunes goes, 
the dream might as well have remained a dream. 
As a result of these discoveries, and many others similar, in gen- 
eral, in significance, it has come to be admitted that Dalton’s atoms 
are very complex bodies, each made up of a large number of cor- 
puscles, which are related to one another very much as are the 
members of a planetary system, though in size corpuscles are un- 
imaginably minute, and the number of them constituting any 
atom is very much larger than the number of members in any planet- 
ary system with which we are acquainted. 
With atoms broken up into corpuscles, the problem of the nature 
of matter shifts one step further back, and becomes the problem 
of the nature of these tiny bodies. Of this problem two rival solu- 
tions are now in the field, offered respectively by the conservatives 
and by the liberals. The former, while admitting that a corpuscle 
is in the main an electric charge, or field of electric force, maintain 
that the charge has a nucleus, or carrier, at its core, which alone is 
entitled to be called matter, in distinction from the electricity of the 
charge. Lenar d, who has given to corpuscles the significant name 
