Page:Collected Physical Papers.djvu/159

Rh found that though the sensitiveness is restored by this expedient of increasing the pressure, yet the restoration is only partial, and that after a repetition of this process the receiver loses its sensitiveness almost completely.

I have attempted to find out an explanation of this obscure "fatigue" effect. This subject will best be treated in connection with the anomalous behaviour of silver, which I find is also in a manner connected with the fatigue effect. Silver, when subjected to radiation, exhibits, as indicated in my last paper, sometimes an increase, and at other times a decrease, of resistance. The difficulty in this case cannot be explained on the supposition of variations of radiation intensity, as the anomaly persists even when the intensity of radiation is maintained uniform by keeping the radiator at a fixed distance.

In order to explain these actions, I assumed the following hypotheses, which, with the necessary deductions, are given below:—

(1) That electric radiation produces molecular change or allotropic modification in a substance.

(2) That, starting from the original molecular condition A, the effect of radiation is to convert it, to a more or less extent, into the allotropic modification B (the latter condition will be designated as the "radiation product"). It follows that this change from one state to the other must be accompanied by a corresponding change in the physical properties of the substance.

(3) As one of the properties of a substance is its electric conductivity, any allotropic change