Aether and Matter
1st Edition
Published on 27. November 2019
978-0-259-62300-7 (ISBN)
Description
Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The following Essay was originally undertaken mainly as a contribution towards the systematic theoretical development of the standpoint which considers electricity, as well as matter, to be constituted on an atomic basis.
This is, as regards its general idea, no recent hypothesis. Within ten years of the publication of the fundamental discoveries of Volta, in the year 1800, which first revealed the existence of permanent electric currents, Sir Humphry Davy had been led to maintain the proposition that chemical and electrical attractions were produced by the same causes, acting in the one case on particles and in the other on masses, as the outcome of the researches on electro-chemistry which are recorded in his earlier Bakerian Lectures: and a little later the foundation for a complete system of chemistry was sought by Berzelius in a distinction between electro-positive and electro-negative atoms.
This is, as regards its general idea, no recent hypothesis. Within ten years of the publication of the fundamental discoveries of Volta, in the year 1800, which first revealed the existence of permanent electric currents, Sir Humphry Davy had been led to maintain the proposition that chemical and electrical attractions were produced by the same causes, acting in the one case on particles and in the other on masses, as the outcome of the researches on electro-chemistry which are recorded in his earlier Bakerian Lectures: and a little later the foundation for a complete system of chemistry was sought by Berzelius in a distinction between electro-positive and electro-negative atoms.
