Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/53

Rh as consisting of bits of electric charge in rapid motion, owing their special properties to the number of such bits within them, and also, no doubt, to the particular orbits described by the electrons. If space permitted it would be interesting to show how admirably the periodicity of the properties of the elements, as expressed in Mendelejeff's table, can be accounted for on the basis of an increasing number of like electrons constituting the atoms of the successive elements. We have molecules consisting, at the simplest, of two such systems within the sphere of each other's attraction, perhaps something as we have double stars in the heavens.

A possible explanation of the puzzling property of valence is offered, in that an atom less one electron, or plus one electron, may be considered as electrically charged, and therefore capable of attracting other bodies, oppositely charged, to form electrically neutral systems. An atom less two electrons, or with two electrons in excess, would have twice the ability to combine, it would be what we call divalent, and so on. An electronic structure of the atom furnishes a basis from which a plausible explanation of the refraction, polarization and rotation of the plane of polarized light may be logically derived. Hitherto explanations for the observed facts have been either wanting or more or less unsatisfactory. For instance, grant the actual existence of tetrahedral carbon atoms, with different groups asymmetrically arranged at the apices, and yet we can not see any good and valid reason why such a structure should be able to rotate the plane of polarized light. Grant that the molecule consists of systems of corpuscles traveling in well-defined orbits, and we see at once how light, consisting of other electrons of the same kind, traversing this maze, must be influenced.

Adopting this theory of corpuscles or electrons, not a concept of any value need be abandoned. On the contrary, the theory furnishes us with plausible explanations of many facts previously unexplained. Its influence is all in a forward direction towards a simplification and unification of our knowledge of nature.

A few words must be said regarding the old, the threadbare, argument which, of course, is cited against the electron theory. The materialist says he simply can not accept a theory which obliges him to give up the idea of the existence of matter; he says the table is there because he can see it and feel it and that must end the discussion for any one with common sense and moderately good judgment. Now it is the reverse of common sense to let that end the discussion, and our materialist is pluming himself on precisely those qualities which he most conspicuously lacks. He assumes the obnoxious theory to involve consequences which it does not involve and then condemns it because of those consequences. As a rule it is because he knows little about it, and has thought less, that he assumes the electron theory to be pure idealism in an ingenious disguise, that form of idealism which asserts