Every Property May be Universal.
Here we are reminded of a striking experiment by Faraday: exciting an electro-magnet of gigantic proportions he showed that every substance he brought near to it was affected in a definite degree. He found iron to be pre-eminently magnetic, much as Madame Curie has shown radium to be vastly more radio-active than any other substance. From Faraday’s time to the present hour the whole trend of investigation has built up the probability that every known property in some degree exists in all matter whatever. Copper conducts electricity remarkably well, and gutta percha conducts remarkably ill; but gutta percha has some little conductivity, or thinner sheets of it than those now used would suffice to keep within an ocean cable the throbs which pass between America and Europe. In radio-activity many substances may be as low in the scale as is gutta percha in the list of electric conductors; in that case no existing means of detection would make the property manifest.