transmits. The connection sought for is furnished us by the electron or corpuscle, an electrical centre movable with respect to the ether, and carrying with it its divergent electric field.
This was the fundamental idea which caused Lorentz to conceive of the possibility of a relative displacement of electrified centres of divergence of the electric field, and of the ether considered as immovable. This displacement takes place without any change in the amount of the charge, that is to say, that the surface which is displaced in the ether with the electron is crossed by an electric flux which is completely invariable. It is the fundamental principle of the conservation of electricity, which will perhaps absorb the principle of the conservation of matter, as we cannot have matter without electricity. It is, however, probable that electricity alone is not sufficient to constitute matter.
We have actually no very precise information of the relative displacement of charges and of the ether, of electrified centres in an immovable medium, no tangible form under which we can conceive it. The attempts which have thus far been made to obtain a concrete representation, in order to give a material structure to the ether, have all been sterile of results. Perhaps there is a difficulty which belongs to the actual constitution of our minds, habituated by our secular evolution to think through matter, unable to form a concrete representation which is not material; also it seems scarcely reasonable to seek to construct a simple medium such as the ether by considering it to spring from a complex and various medium like matter. I believe it will be necessary to think ether, to conceive of it independently of all material representations, by means of those electromagnetic properties which put us in contact with it. I will return to this point later in reference to the mechanical theories of the ether.
If the electric charge is assumed to have a volume distribution in a portion of the medium, the principle of the conservation of electricity, and also the possibility of relative displacement of electricity and ether, makes it necessary for us, in this portion of space, to modify the equations of Hertz relative to the displacement current by the addition of a convection current, a necessary consequence of the existence of a displacement current connected with a motion of charges, and implying the production of a magnetic field by the motion of electrified bodies across the medium. This consequence of Hertz's equations has now received complete experimental confirmation.
Moreover, the experimental facts impose on these movable charges a discontinuous, granular structure, and lead to the idea of the electron as a singular region of the ether, carrying a charge equal to that of the hydrogen atom in electrolysis, but of different sign, and distributed on the surface or in the volume of the electron
