Other processes may be used which all give the same two quantities by two suitably chosen measurements.  Such are the radius of the curve taken by the trajectory of the pencil in a perpendicular magnetic field and the measure of the fall of potential under which the discharge takes place, or the measure of the total quantity of electricity carried in one second and the measure of the calorific energy which may be given, during the same period, to a thermo-electric junction.  The results agree as well as can be expected, having regard to the difficulty of the experiments; the values of the speed agree also with those which Professor Wiechert has obtained by direct measurement.

The speed never depends on the nature of the gas contained in the Crookes tube, but varies with the value of the fall of potential at the cathode.  It is of the order of one tenth of the speed of light, and it may rise as high as one third.  The cathode particle therefore goes about three thousand times faster than the earth in its orbit.  The relation is also invariable, even when the substance of which the cathode is formed is changed or one gas is substituted for another.  It is, on the average, a thousand times greater than the corresponding relation in electrolysis.  As experiment has shown, in all the circumstances where it has been possible to effect measurements, the equality of the charges carried by all corpuscules, ions, atoms, etc., we ought to consider that the charge of the electron is here, again, that of a univalent ion in electrolysis, and therefore that its mass is only a small fraction of that of the atom of hydrogen, viz., of the order of about a thousandth part.  This is the same result as that to which we were led by the study of flames.

The thorough examination of the cathode radiation, then, confirms us in the idea that every material atom can be dissociated and will yield an electron much smaller than itself—­and always identical whatever the matter whence it comes,—­the rest of the atom remaining charged with a positive quantity equal and contrary to that borne by the electron.  In the present case these positive ions are no doubt those that we again meet with in the canal rays.  Professor Wien has shown that their mass is really, in fact, of the order of the mass of atoms.  Although they are all formed of identical electrons, there may be various cathode rays, because the velocity is not exactly the same for all electrons.  Thus is explained the fact that we can separate them and that we can produce a sort of spectrum by the action of the magnet, or, again, as M. Deslandres has shown in a very interesting experiment, by that of an electrostatic field.  This also probably explains the phenomena studied by M. Villard, and previously pointed out.

Sec. 2.  RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCES

Even in ordinary conditions, certain substances called radioactive emit, quite outside any particular reaction, radiations complex indeed, but which pass through fairly thin layers of minerals, impress photographic plates, excite fluorescence, and ionize gases.  In these radiations we again find electrons which thus escape spontaneously from radioactive bodies.