Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/339

Rh by the Röntgen rays given out by the tube in which the corpuscles are produced than when they strike against a target opaque to these rays. I have tested the heating effects produced in permeable and opaque targets, but have never been able to get evidence of any considerable difference between the two cases. The differences actually observed were small compared with the total effect and were sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the opposite. The experiments, therefore, tell against the view that the whole "of the mass of a corpuscle is due to its electrical charge. The idea that mass in general is electrical in its origin is a fascinating one, although it has not at present been reconciled with the results of experience.

The smallness of these particles marks them out as likely to afford a very valuable means for investigating the details of molecular structure, a structure so fine that even waves of light are on far too large a scale to be suitable for its investigation, as a single wave length extends over a large number of molecules. This anticipation has been fully realized by Lenard's experiments on the obstruction offered to the passage of these corpuscles through different substances. Lenard found that this obstruction depended only upon the density of the substance and not upon its chemical composition or physical state. He found that, if he took plates of different substances of equal areas and of such thicknesses that the masses of all the plates were the same, then, no matter what the plates were made of, whether of insulators or conductors, whether of gases, liquids or solids, the resistance they offered to the passage of the corpuscles through them was the same. Now this is exactly what would happen if the atom of the chemical elements were aggregations of a large number of equal particles of equal mass; the mass of an atom being proportional to the number of these particles contained in it and the atom being a collection of such particles through the interstices between which the corpuscle might find its way. Thus a collision between a corpuscle and an atom would not be so much a collision between the corpuscle and the atom as a whole, as between a corpuscle and the individual particles of which the atom consists; and the number of collisions the corpuscle would make, and therefore the resistance it would experience, would be the same if the number of particles in unit volume were the same, whatever the nature of the atoms might be into which these particles are aggregated. The number of particles in unit volume is however fixed by the density of the substance and thus on this view the density and the density alone should fix the resistance offered by the substance to the motion of a corpuscle through it; this, however, is precisely Lenard's result, which is thus a strong confirmation of the view that the atoms of the.elementary substances are made up of simpler parts all of which are alike. This and similar views of the