Page:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 1.djvu/78

38 mobile. The other properties of fluids, such as their inertia, weight, and elasticity, are not attributed to them by those who have used the theory for merely mathematical purposes; but the use of the word Fluid has been apt to mislead the vulgar, including many men of science who are not natural philosophers, and who have seized on the word Fluid as the only term in the statement of the theory which seemed intelligible to them.

We shall see that the mathematical treatment of the subject has been greatly developed by writers who express themselves in terms of the 'Two Fluids' theory. Their results, however, have been deduced entirely from data which can be proved by experiment, and which must therefore be true, whether we adopt the theory of two fluids or not. The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.

The introduction of two fluids permits us to consider the negative electrification of A and the positive electrification of B as the effect of any one of three different processes which would lead to the same result. We have already supposed it produced by the transfer of P units of positive electricity from A to B, together with the transfer of N units of negative electricity from B to A. But if P+N units of positive electricity had been transferred from A to B, or if P+N units of negative electricity had been transferred from B to A, the resulting 'free electricity' on A and on B would have been the same as before, but the quantity of 'combined electricity' in A would have been less in the second case and greater in the third than it was in the first.

It would appear therefore, according to this theory, that it is possible to alter not only the amount of free electricity in a body, but the amount of combined electricity. But no phenomena have ever been observed in electrified bodies which can be traced to the varying amount of their combined electricities. Hence either the combined electricities have no observable properties, or the amount of the combined electricities is incapable of variation. The first of these alternatives presents no difficulty to the mere mathematician, who attributes no properties to the fluids except those of attraction and repulsion, for in this point of view the two fluids simply annul one another, and their combination is a true mathematical zero. But to those who cannot use the word Fluid without thinking of a substance it is difficult to conceive that the combination of the two fluids shall have no properties at all, so that