SEVENTH SERIES No. 3344 August 8, 1908. FROM BEGINNING CONTENTS Shakespeare and a National Theatre, 1. The Electric Theory of Matter. By W. A. Shenstone CORNHILL MAGAZINE 323 By Charles Whibley. NATIONAL REVIEW 330 The Power of the Keys. Chapter XIX. The Man. By Sydney C. 336 IV. The Meaning of the International Moral Education Congress. 344 FOR SIX DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the United States. To Canada the postage is 50 cente per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office or express money order if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express and money orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE CO. Single Copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents THE INTERVAL I. I sleep. The panoply of sense, The breasts of love, the battle dense, (That soft and silver thief!) It wakes; nor ever eye can probe II. I die. The treasure-ships I sought, The lives wherewith my Own was wrought (As in some tapestry gem-fraught) Nearly and tenderly, And the tune mine ear had almost caught, All sink away from me. Then dreamless æons interpose. The gap, perchance, is long. Will the Self wake to strains it knows? Time passes. Blue the summer skies, Time passes. Vain to bid him stay Time passes. Swift his wingèd flight. Time passes. Summer suns will set, The Pall Mall Magazine. THE ELECTRIC THEORY OF MATTER. I read the other day in one of our leading weekly reviews an eloquent article which informed me that the most striking discovery of modern times has been the "transmutation of the elements," and that while the seventy or eighty known elements have long been suspected by philosophers to be compounded from one and the same kind of matter, there has now been observed the actual transformation of uranium into radium, of radium into helium and perhaps also into lead. Now, there is in these statements so much "mixing up of things which differ," of facts and hypotheses still very much upon their trial, that the perusal of this article has suggested to me that those who are 'interested in the progress of physics and chemistry might welcome, at this moment, a brief account of that latest phase of the ever recurring idea that every bit of matter in every form may consist, really, of the same ultimate material. This idea also has recently suggested that the chemical atoms, of which all matter consists, are made up solely of systems of electric charges. As the work of this theory is not yet done, as the fate of this latest reading of the riddle of the mystery of matter still lies on the lap of the gods, it may seem to some of my readers that the subject is not very well suited for the pages of the Cornhill. I believe, however, that those who think this are wrong, for if we wish cultivated men and women to take a living interest in the progress of science, and to be able, as they very well might be, to avoid falling into such mistakes as those to be found in the article referred to Since these words were written, the Maga zine and its readers have to deplore the sudden death of the writer. He was a teacher kept fresh by original research: a Science Master at Clifton who was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. Readers of the CORNHILL know his gift of lucid guidance through the * above, we must not ask them always to be content with the realized knowledge of the text-book and the museum, though these are very good things in their places, but must go with them also, now and them, into the workshop and there show them science in the making. And this is what I propose to do on the present occasion. Before we enter the theory shop and endeavor to follow the growth of the "electric theory of matter" I must ask those who go there with me first to delay for a moment and recall one or two matters of considerable importance. In the first place we must remember that a scientific theory has to perform two distinct functions, viz. to record a larger or smaller number of isolated or seemingly isolated facts, and to give us some clear idea of a connection between these facts so that we may be able to deduce them one from another and predict new facts that may be discovered by means of new experiments suggested by the theory. Secondly, we must consider that a theory, like a tree, is to be judged by its fruits, and that an unproductive or worn out theory, like an unfruitful tree, must be cast into the fire. It is important that we do not forget this, for the hypothesis that is the subject of this article is as yet incomplete. Its fruits have still to be gathered and tested. There is much which suggests that in due course the electric theory of matter may prove as fruitful as the atomic theory of the nineteenth century, but the electric theory to-day, like the atomic theory a century ago, is still imperfect, still upon its trial. If I may compare it to a tool, we may say that intricate maze and theory; but though they might guess, they could not know as the Editor knew his ceaseless care in recasting, condensing, clarifying, and withal the simple modesty of his attitude towards Nature and his fellow men. - ED. CORNHILL MAGAZINE. at present we have not the finished tool, but only a rough casting from which, perhaps, a finished tool may be constructed, before long. I need hardly say that it is important my readers should have a clear idea what it is the electric theory of matter has to explain. Perhaps we shall best discover how we stand on this point if we ask ourselves the question, What is matter? What are the isolated facts about matter which this theory must co-ordinate? Now, this question is very difficult to answer. Most of us know a good deal about the surface differences which distinguish the myriad forms in which matter presents itself to us, but our real knowledge of its nature and constitution is slight indeed. According to J. S. Mill, matter is "the permanent possibility of sensations." According to W. K. Clif ford it "is a mental picture in which mind-stuff is the thing represented," while "mind-stuff is constituted by feelings which can exist by themselves, without forming parts of a consciousness, but are also woven into the complex form of human minds." For our present purpose, however, speculations like these retain only an historic importance. For us, as the late Professor P. G. Tait has expressed it, the universe, including matter, has an objective existence, and we become aware of it by the aid of our senses, and, since the evidence of the senses often misleads, we endeavor to sift the mixture of truth from error gained through the use of our senses by the exercise of the reason, for example, by forming theories such as the atomic theory of Dalton and the electric theory of the new physics. According to the electric theory, matter in all its forms consists, as I have said, of systems of electric charges. This idea is the outcome of the work of the atomists, Dalton and his colleagues, on the one hand, and of the work of Faraday and his great successors on the other. Broadly speaking, we may say that Dalton reinvented atoms for the use of the chemists, that the physicists, with Professor J. J. Thomson at their head, discovered the existence of particles, called electrons, even smaller than atoms, and that authors of the electric theory hope to establish the nature of the electron, and to discover the relation of the electron to the atom. It is not necessary to dwell for long on the atomic molecular theory, for this has already been fully discussed in the Cornhill. It will be sufficient if we remember that according to chemists matter exists in the form of a limited number of elements, about eighty of these elements being known to us, and that each of these elements occurs in the form of characteristic minute unbreakable particles called atoms. I suppose that in modern times a few investigators have really believed of any given atom that it would exist for ever, or that it had existed in the past from all eternity. But undoubtedly some of the greatest masters of the modern school, e. g. Clerk Maxwell, have held there is reason to believe that in the atoms of the chemists "we have something which has existed either from eternity, or at least from times anterior to the existing order of nature"; or, to put the point more explicitly, if I may quote Clerk Maxwell once more, that "the creation of an atom is an operation of a kind which is not, so far as we are aware, going on on earth or in the sun or in stars, either now or since these bodies began to be formed," and must be referred to the epoch of the establishment of the existing order of nature. 2 See The New Physics and Chemistry," On Weighing Atoms." The Living Age, April 29, 1905. 2 See " Atom," by Clerk Maxwell, Encl. Brit 9th ed. The facts before Clerk Maxwell when be wrote the above words gave him no reason for suspecting that possibly chemical atoms might now and then undergo disintegration under our noses. But to-day, though we are as incompetent.as ever to create an atom out of nothing, we are no longer quite convinced that atoms are the smallest particles of matter. This does not mean that the molecular atomic theory is used up and ready for the scrap-heap, for the idea of the atom is as necessary and as useful as ever. atoms no longer seem to us, as to Newton, to be solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, indivisible portions of matter. On the contrary, it has become conceivable that they may consist of constellations of much smaller particles; that they may be built up, that is, of parts and possess in each case a definite structure which sooner or later we may hope to understand. But Although, as I have said, we need not dwell for long on the properties of matter, there are two or three points which we must keep in our minds. First, we must remember that every particle of matter great and small exhibits what is known as "attraction of gravitation"; secondly, that every particle exhibits, also, a kind of passivity or dogged perseverance, called inertia, in virtue of which every body "perseveres in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled by some force to change that state." This, as you will see, implies that if at any time a particle of matter of sensible mass should cease to be subject to attraction of gravitation, or should lose its inertia, we should have to regard it as destroyed. The idea that matter in general may be electrical in its origin recommends itself to many minds all the more because it seems to afford us a stepping stone from which we may proceed towards the attainment of a clear idea of a simple material universe composed of a single primitive matter analogous to that which Prout imagined to be the basis of the chemical elements. It is founded upon that view of electricity which regards the latter as possessing an atomic constitution, and regards a certain quantity of electricity as an indivisible unit. as a sort of atom of electricity, a quantity which can only be increased by adding other units to it, like adding bricks to a wall, but which cannot be divided or diminished by any means yet at our disposal. I suppose every one has seen the well-known and beautiful luminous glow of a vacuum tube. This glow is produced by connecting the poles of an electrical machine to two wires melted into the two ends of a glass tube, and exhausting the tube moderately by means of an air pump. If a vacuum tube in the state in which it gives this glow be further exhausted, its luminosity gradually disappears, breaking up into discs which grow fewer and fewer as the exhaustion proceeds, until at last, if the exhaustion is pushed far enough, no light is seen except a glowing phosphorescence on the surface of the glass, like that which you see when watching experiments with Röntgen ray tubes. It was inside vacuum tubes when highly exhausted that Professor J. J. Thomson recognized, in 1897, particles far smaller than hydrogen atoms and charged with negative electricity. If you obtain a glass tube such as I have described, provided at its two ends with two platinum wires sealed into the glass so that the joints are perfectly air-tight, exhaust it by means of an air-pump until only about one part in a million of the air originally present in the tube remains there, connect the wires to an electrical machine, and then make suitable experiments, you will discover that though |