(Louvre and Windsor), in which an attempt is made to display concentrated cupidity and avarice. The other tendency to excessive emphasis of tenderness may be seen in two replicas of the “Virgin and Child” at Berlin and Amsterdam, where the ecstatic kiss of the mother is quite unreal. But in these examples there is a remarkable glow of colour which makes up for many defects. Expression of despair is strongly exaggerated in a Lucretia at the museum of Vienna. On the whole the best pictures of Matsys are the quietest; his “Virgin and Christ” or “Ecce Homo” and “Mater Dolorosa” (London and Antwerp) display as much serenity and dignity as seems consistent with the master’s art. He had considerable skill as a portrait painter. Egidius at Longford, which drew from Sir Thomas More a eulogy in Latin verse, is but one of a numerous class, to which we may add the portrait of Maximilian of Austria in the gallery of Amsterdam. Matsys in this branch of practice was much under the influence of his contemporaries Lucas of Leiden and Mabuse. His tendency to polish and smoothness excluded to some extent the subtlety of modulation remarkable in Holbein and Dürer. There is reason to think that he was well acquainted with both these German masters. He probably met Holbein more than once on his way to England. He saw Dürer at Antwerp in 1520. Quintin died at Antwerp in 1530. The puritan feeling which slumbered in him was fatal to some of his relatives. His sister Catherine and her husband suffered at Louvain in 1543 for the then capital offence of reading the Bible, he being decapitated, she buried alive in the square fronting the cathedral.
Quintin’s son, Jan Matsys, inherited the art but not the skill of his parent. The earliest of his works, a “St Jerome,” dated 1537, in the gallery of Vienna, the latest, a “Healing of Tobias,” of 1564, in the museum of Antwerp, are sufficient evidence of his tendency to substitute imitation for original thought.
MATTEAWAN, a village of Fishkill township, Dutchess
county, New York, U.S.A., on the eastern bank of the Hudson
river, opposite Newburgh and 15 m. S. of Poughkeepsie. Pop.
(1890), 4278; (1900), 5807 (1044 foreign-born); (1905, state
census), 5584; (1910), 6727. The village is served by the Central
New England railway, and is the seat of the Matteawan state
hospital for the criminal insane, the Highland hospital, and the
Sargeant industrial school. The Teller House dates back to
the beginning of the 18th century. Near Matteawan is Beacon
Hill, the highest of the highlands, which has an electric railway
to its summit. There are manufactures of hats, rubber goods,
machinery (notably “fuel-economizers”), &c., water-power
being furnished by Fishkill Creek. The village owns its
water-works, the supply for which is derived from Beacon
Hill. Matteawan was incorporated as a village in 1886.
MATTER. Our conceptions of the nature and structure of matter have been profoundly influenced in recent years by
investigations on the Conduction of Electricity through Gases
(see Conduction, Electric) and on Radio-activity (q.v.).
These researches and the ideas which they have suggested have
already thrown much light on some of the most fundamental
questions connected with matter; they have, too, furnished us
with far more powerful methods for investigating many problems
connected with the structure of matter than those hitherto
available. There is thus every reason to believe that our
knowledge of the structure of matter will soon become far
more precise and complete than it is at present, for now we have
the means of settling by testing directly many points which
are still doubtful, but which formerly seemed far beyond the
reach of experiment.
The Molecular Theory of Matter—the only theory ever seriously advocated—supposes that all visible forms of matter are collocations of simpler and smaller portions. There has been a continuous tendency as science has advanced to reduce further and further the number of the different kinds of things of which all matter is supposed to be built up. First came the molecular theory teaching us to regard matter as made up of an enormous number of small particles, each kind of matter having its characteristic particle, thus the particles of water were supposed to be different from those of air and indeed from those of any other substance. Then came Dalton’s Atomic Theory which taught that these molecules, in spite of their almost infinite variety, were all built up of still smaller bodies, the atoms of the chemical elements, and that the number of different types of these smaller bodies was limited to the sixty or seventy types which represent the atoms of the substance regarded by chemists as elements.
In 1815 Prout suggested that the atoms of the heavier chemical elements were themselves composite and that they were all built up of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, so that all the different forms of matter are edifices built of the same material—the atom of hydrogen. If the atoms of hydrogen do not alter in weight when they combine to form atoms of other elements the atomic weights of all elements would be multiples of that of hydrogen; though the number of elements whose atomic weights are multiples or very nearly so of hydrogen is very striking, there are several which are universally admitted to have atomic weights differing largely from whole numbers. We do not know enough about gravity to say whether this is due to the change of weight of the hydrogen atoms when they combine to form other atoms, or whether the primordial form from which all matter is built up is something other than the hydrogen atom. Whatever may be the nature of this primordial form, the tendency of all recent discoveries has been to emphasize the truth of the conception of a common basis of matter of all kinds. That the atoms of the different elements have a common basis, that they behave as if they consisted of different numbers of small particles of the same kind, is proved to most minds by the Periodic Law of Mendeléeff and Newlands (see Element). This law shows that the physical and chemical properties of the different elements are determined by their atomic weights, or to use the language of mathematics, the properties of an element are functions of its atomic weight. Now if we constructed models of the atoms out of different materials, the atomic weight would be but one factor out of many which would influence the physical and chemical properties of the model, we should require to know more than the atomic weight to fix its behaviour. If we were to plot a curve representing the variation of some property of the substance with the atomic weight we should not expect the curve to be a smooth one, for instance two atoms might have the same atomic weight and yet if they were made of different materials have no other property in common. The influence of the atomic weight on the properties of the elements is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the recent developments of physics connected with the discharge of electricity through gases and with radio-activity. The transparency of bodies to Röntgen rays, to cathode rays, to the rays emitted by radio-active substances, the quality of the secondary radiation emitted by the different elements are all determined by the atomic weight of the element. So much is this the case that the behaviour of the element with respect to these rays has been used to determine its atomic weight, when as in the case of Indium, uncertainty as to the valency of the element makes the result of ordinary chemical methods ambiguous.
The radio-active elements indeed furnish us with direct evidence of this unity of composition of matter, for not only does one element uranium, produce another, radium, but all the radio-active substances give rise to helium, so that the substance of the atoms of this gas must be contained in the atoms of the radio-active elements.
It is not radio-active atoms alone that contain a common constituent, for it has been found that all bodies can by suitable treatment, such as raising them to incandescence or exposing them to ultra-violet light, be made to emit negatively electrified particles, and that these particles are the same from whatever source they may be derived. These particles all carry the same charge of negative electricity and all have the same mass, this mass is exceedingly small even when compared with the mass of an atom of hydrogen, which until the discovery of these particles was the smallest mass known to science. These
