Page:Modern Views on Matter.djvu/17

 Rh bodies, being able to propel light windmills, to heat platinum to redness, and to charge an electroscope; they are also able to penetrate thin sheets of metal and to affect photographic plates or phosphorescent substances on the other side. They are not so penetrating, however, as are some of the Röntgen rays.

The final definite establishment of the fact that these flying particles are not atoms of matter, but are bits chipped off the atoms, fractions of an atom as it were, the same identical kind of bits being chipped off every kind of chemical atom, their mass always about one-thousandth of that of a hydrogen atom, and moving under favourable circumstances with something not much less than the speed of light, is due to the researches of Professor J. J. Thomson and his coadjutors in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and represents a long series of measurements devised and executed with consummate skill.

I have no time to go into detail concerning these important and elaborate and most interesting investigations. Suffice it to say that portions of them are due to your own Wykeham Professor of Physics, Professor Townsend, working in conjunction and collaboration with others, under the leadership of Professor J. J. Thomson; and that this whole series of Cavendish Laboratory researches may be said to constitute the high-water mark of the world's Experimental Physics during the beginning of this century.

5. I must not dwell upon the properties and powers of electrons, nor upon the experimental means by which these measurements were made, for it is far too large