14 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1906. 
of dynamides, has calculated the diameter of this center of actual 
matter, so-called, and found it to be smaller than 0.3 of 10' 10 , i. e>, 
smaller than three hundred thousand millionths of a millimeter. 
This means that the actual matter, so-called, of a cubic meter of so 
heavy an element as platinum, occupies at most one cubic millimeter 
of space, the rest of the cubic meter being empty of Lenard’s matter 
and in fact entirely empty of ponderable matter but for the electric 
charges. 
With so much of matter acknowledged to be electric force, which 
to that extent successfully performs all the functions which used 
to be attributed to matter, it is natural, say the liberals, to inquire 
whether the whole of matter cannot be reduced to force — whether 
matter is not just force and nothing more. Many facts, they say, 
make this altogether the more probable, indeed the only compre- 
hensible hypothesis. 
In the first place, as Sir Oliver Lodge, who shares with Professor 
J. J. Thomson, another hardheaded Englishman, the distinction of 
leading the liberals, points out, “And electric charge possesses the 
most fundamental and characteristic property of matter, viz., mass 
or inertia.’ ” 2 If the charges occupying a given space are sufficient, 
and their potential is sufficiently high, their combined mass will 
equal, and exhaustively account for, the observed mass of the mat- 
ter occupying the space. This conclusion was theoretically estab- 
lished long since, and has recently received experimental confirmation 
from laboratory studies on radio-activity. 
On these points I quote the statement of Professor Bigelow, of the 
University of Michigan: “Long before experimental evidence of the 
existence of corpuscles had been obtained, it was demonstrated 
that an electrically charged body, moving with high velocity, had an 
apparent mass greater than its true mass, because of the electrical 
charge. The faster it moved the greater became its apparent mass, 
or, what comes to the same thing, assuming the electrical charge 
to remain unaltered, the greater the velocity, the less the mass 
of the body carrying the charge needed to be to have always the same 
apparent mass. It was calculated that when the velocity equalled 
that of light, it was not necessary to assume that the body carrying 
the charge had any mass at all ! In other words, the bit of electric 
charge moving with the velocity of light would have weight and all 
the properties of mass. 
“This might be .looked upon as an interesting mathematical 
abstraction, but without any practical application, if it were not 
for the fact that Kaufmann determined the apparent masses of 
2 Pop. Sci. Mo., August, 1903. 
