Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/858

776 which have arisen in regard to this apparently new manifestation of the cathode rays. In the first place, they are apparently not refracted by paraffine, vulcanite, or wood, or by any substance which is penetrated by them. To test this, I employed a double-convex lens of wood and also a double-concave lens of the same material. I placed two copper rings in the concavity of the double-concave lens of wood, and also a similar copper ring outside the lens at the same height from the sensitive plate, as one of the rings which rested on the wood of the lens. I also placed a ring on the double-convex lens, and employed two cathodes to obtain two shadows from different positions. The thickness of the wooden lenses varied from half an inch to three quarters of an inch. The images obtained through the wood of the lenses were not distorted or changed in figure in any way by the wood, and therefore no refraction could be observed by this method. On account of the quick diffusibility of the rays, no accurate method of determining a possible index of refraction seems possible. If the photographic effect is due to longitudinal waves in the ether, and if these waves travel with great velocity, no refraction would probably be observed. Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory of light supposes that only transverse waves are set up in the ether, and no longitudinal waves exist. On the other hand, Helmholtz's electro-magnetic theory of light postulates longitudinal waves as well as transverse waves. The longitudinal waves travel with an infinite velocity. Is it therefore possible that the X waves are the longitudinal waves of Helmholtz's theory? Our apparent inability to refract the rays lends color to this hypothesis. Röntgen, in the preliminary account of his experiments, intimates that the phenomena may be due to longitudinal waves, and in a late article in the Annalen der Physik und Chemie, by Jaumann, entitled Longitudinal Light, Maxwell's electro-magnetic equations are modified so as to embrace the phenomenon of cathode rays; and the author shows that even Maxwell's theory can, under certain conditions, give a longitudinal wave.

The cathode rays can be deflected by a magnet, and it is said that the X rays can not. It must be borne in mind, however, that when the cathode rays are widely divergent it is difficult to deflect them by a magnet; the stream density, so to speak, is too feeble. The X rays, therefore, may be only cathode rays modified by passing through the glass vessel; and the stream of rays may be of too feeble a character to be influenced by a magnet that is, they may be still cathode rays. The want of refractive power and the want of magnetic action have not been fully established. Crookes early showed that two cathode beams sent out from two cathodes placed beside each other, repelled each other, as if they consisted of streams of negatively electrified molecules. If the two beams