, which agrees perfectly with the value which I obtained from the measurements on the isolation and measurement of the electron.
It has been because of such agreements as the foregoing that the last trace of opposition to the kinetic and atomic hypotheses of matter has disappeared from the scientific world, and that even Ostwald has been willing to make such a statement as that quoted on [p. 10].
CHAPTER VIII
IS THE ELECTRON ITSELF DIVISIBLE?
It would not be in keeping with the method of modern science to make any dogmatic assertion as to the indivisibility of the electron. Such assertions used to be made in high-school classes with respect to the atoms of the elements, but the far-seeing among physicists, like Faraday, were always careful to disclaim any belief in the necessary ultimateness of the atoms of chemistry, and that simply because there existed until recently no basis for asserting anything about the insides of the atom. We knew that there was a smallest thing which took part in chemical reactions and we named that thing the atom, leaving its insides entirely to the future.
Precisely similarly the electron was defined as the smallest quantity of electricity which ever was found to appear in electrolysis, and nothing was then said or is now said about its necessary ultimateness. Our experiments have, however, now shown that this quantity is capable of isolation and exact measurement, and that all the kinds of charges which we have been able to investigate are exact multiples of it. Its value is
.
I. A SECOND METHOD OF OBTAINING
I have presented one way of measuring this charge, but there is an indirect method of arriving at it which was worked out independently by Rutherford and Geiger[95] and Regener.[96] The unique feature in this method consists in actually counting the number of