Aether and Matter

Excerpt from Aether and Matter 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.