charges are distributed in a continuous manner in space, a mass of gas electrically neutral could furnish a limited quantity of electricity of each kind, decreasing with the time by progressive recombination if one delays the establishment of the electric field in the gas.
It is indeed necessary to admit, for the two electricities, a discontinuous structure in order to allow their coexistence without completely neutralizing one another. The progressive recombination of the charged particles or ions of two kinds would produce this neutralization at the moment of their mutual collisions.
The phenomena of the saturation current, of the limited quantity of free electricity in a gas, were obtained under conditions most favorable to experimental study, when, immediately after the discovery of Roentgen rays and like radiations, one had recognized their property of making the gas they traversed a conductor of electricity. The limited charge which we can extract from a gas thus modified, the velocity, finite and easily measured, with which they move under the action of an electric field, their progressive recombination, are interpreted in an admirable manner on the hypothesis that the radiations, as well as the intense heat agitations in a flame, dissociate a certain number of the molecules of the gas into electrified parts carrying charges of opposite kinds.
(8) The Phenomena of Condensation. We know how the phenomena of condensation of supersaturated water vapor in the presence of a conducting gas, already referred by H. von Helmholtz to the presence of ions, has given the preceding hypothesis a brilliant confirmation. As a result of the researches of J. J. Thomson, Townsend, C. T. R. Wilson, and H. A. Wilson, these droplets of visible water, each formed by condensation around an electrified centre, bring forward a tangible witness to the existence of these centres, and furnish a means of measuring the individual charge, present on each drop of water formed, and equal to about 3.4 x 10-10 electrostatic units of electricity according to the recent measurements of J. J. Thomson and H. A. Wilson.
The fundamental idea in these kinds of measurements, applied for the first time by Townsend to the charged drops which are produced in the presence of saturated water vapor in recently prepared gases, consists in deducing the mass of each drop from its velocity of fall under the action of gravity by means of Stokes's formula, which gives the frictional resistance of a sphere moving through a viscous medium, and which expresses the velocity of fall in terms of the radius of the drop and consequently of its mass. We can obtain from this the electric charge carried by each drop if we know the ratio of this charge to the mass.
This ratio can be obtained, as was done by Townsend and J. J. Thomson, by measuring or calculating the total mass of water carried
