movement is extremely rapid, and can only occasionally be perceived. It is probable that it would be still more accelerated in smaller objects; but the latter will always escape our observation.
Its Independence of the Nature of the Bodies and of the Environment.—M. Gouy remarked that the movement depends neither on the nature nor on the form of the particles. Even the nature of the liquid has but little effect. Its degree of viscosity alone comes into play. The movements are, indeed, more lively in alcohol or ether, which are very mobile liquids; they are slow in sulphuric acid and in glycerine. In water, a grain one two-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter traverses, in a second, ten or twelve times its own length.
The fact that the Brownian movement is seen in liquors which have been boiled, in acids and in concentrated alkalies, in toxic solutions of all degrees of temperature, shows conclusively that the phenomenon has no vital significance; that it is in no way connected with vital activity so called.
Its Indefinite Duration.—The most remarkable character of this phenomenon is its permanence, its indefinite duration. The movement never ceases, the particles never attain repose and equilibrium. Granitic rocks contain quartz crystals which, at the moment of their formation, include within a closed cavity a drop of water containing a bubble of gas. These bubbles, contemporary with the Plutonian age of the globe, have never since their formation ceased to manifest the Brownian movement.
Its Independence of External Conditions.—What is the cause of this eternal oscillation? Is it a tremor of the earth? No! M. Gouy saw the Brownian
