its neighbourhood; moving the body involves the production of a varying electric field, and, therefore, of a certain amount of energy which is proportional to the square of the velocity. This causes the charged body to behave as if its mass were increased by a quantity, which for a charged sphere is (‘Recent Researches in Electricity and Magnetism'), where e is the charge and α the radius of the sphere. If we assume that it is this mass which we are concerned with in the cathode rays, since m/e would vary as e/α, it affords no clue to the explanation of either of the properties (1 and 2) of these rays. This is not by any means the only objection to this hypothesis, which I only mention to show that it has not been overlooked.
The explanation which seems to me to account in the most simple and straightforward manner for the facts is founded on a view of the constitution of the chemical elements which has been favourably entertained by many chemists: this view is that the atoms of the different chemical elements are different aggregations of atoms of the same kind. In the form in which this hypothesis was enunciated by Prout, the atoms of the different elements were hydrogen atoms; in this precise form the hypothesis is not tenable, but if we substitute for hydrogen some unknown primordial substance X, there is nothing known which is inconsistent with this hypothesis, which is one that has been recently supported by Sir Norman Lockyer for reasons derived from the study of the stellar spectra.
If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays. They would evidently give a value of m/e which is independent of the nature of the gas and its pressure, for the carriers are the same whatever the gas may be; again, the mean free paths of these corpuscles would depend upon the density of the medium through which they pass. For the molecules of the medium are composed of a number of such corpuscles separated by considerable spaces; now the collision between a single corpuscle and the molecule will not be between the corpuscles and the molecule as a whole, but between this corpuscle and the individual corpuscles which form the molecule; thus the number of collisions the particle makes as it moves through a crowd of these molecules will be proportional, not to the number of the
