Electricity was found, or certain eminent
physicists thought they had found, that electricity _per se_ had inertia.
So the windmills in the Crookes' vacuum tubes were supposed to be moved by
the impact of electric atoms.
Then in the progress of ordinary research the discovery of radium by Madame
Curie in the year 1902 put an entirely new face upon the subject of
electrons. The beta particles emanating from radium were soon identified
with the electrons of the cathode ray. Then followed the discovery that the
gas helium, previously treated as a separate element, evolved itself as one
consequence of the disintegration of radium. Transmutation, till then
laughed at as a superstition of the alchemist, passed quietly into the
region of accepted natural phenomena, and the chemical elements were seen
to be bodies built up of electrons in varying number and probably in
varying arrangements. So at last ordinary science had reached one important
result of the occult research carried on seven years earlier. It has not
yet reached the finer results of the occult research--the _structure_ of
the hydrogen atom with its eighteen etheric atoms and the way in which the
atomic weights of all elements are explained by the number of etheric atoms
entering into their constitution.
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