M. Benoist has founded on the transparency of matter to the rays a sure and practical method of allowing them to be distinguished, and has thus been enabled to define a specific character analogous to the colour of the rays of light.  It is probable also that the different rays do not transport individually the same quantity of energy.  We have not yet obtained on this point precise results, but it is roughly known, since the experiments of MM.  Rutherford and M’Clung, what quantity of energy corresponds to a pencil of X rays.  These physicists have found that this quantity would be, on an average, five hundred times larger than that brought by an analogous pencil of solar light to the surface of the earth.  What is the nature of this energy?  The question does not appear to have been yet solved.

It certainly appears, according to Professors Haga and Wind and to Professor Sommerfeld, that with the X rays curious experiments of diffraction may be produced.  Dr Barkla has shown also that they can manifest true polarization.  The secondary rays emitted by a metallic surface when struck by X rays vary, in fact, in intensity when the position of the plane of incidence round the primary pencil is changed.  Various physicists have endeavoured to measure the speed of propagation, but it seems more and more probable that it is very nearly that of light.[27]

[Footnote 27:  See especially the experiments of Professor E. Marx (Vienna), Annalen der Physik, vol. xx. (No. 9 of 1906), pp. 677 et seq., which seem conclusive on this point.—­ED.]

I must here leave out the description of a crowd of other experiments.  Some very interesting researches by M. Brunhes, M. Broca, M. Colardeau, M. Villard, in France, and by many others abroad, have permitted the elucidation of several interesting problems relative to the duration of the emission or to the best disposition to be adopted for the production of the rays.  The only point which will detain us is the important question as to the nature of the X rays themselves; the properties which have just been brought to mind are those which appear essential and which every theory must reckon with.

The most natural hypothesis would be to consider the rays as ultra-violet radiations of very short wave-length, or radiations which are in a manner ultra-ultra-violet.  This interpretation can still, at this present moment, be maintained, and the researches of MM.  Buisson, Righi, Lenard, and Merrit Stewart have even established that rays of very short wave-lengths produce on metallic conductors, from the point of view of electrical phenomena, effects quite analogous to those of the X rays.  Another resemblance results also from the experiments by which M. Perreau established that these rays act on the electric resistance of selenium.  New and valuable arguments have thus added force to those who incline towards a theory which has the merit of bringing a new phenomenon within the pale of phenomena previously known.