Statical implies stationary; undulatory, wave-like.
[59] Communicated to the American Philosophical Society.
[60] The words gyration, vortex, and whirl are considered as synonymous, and used indifferently to avoid monotony.
[61] I consider a wire as galvanized, when it is made the medium of the discharge from a galvanic battery.
[62] In some electro-magnetic apparatus, the polarity of an electro-magnet is reversed more than 100 times in a second.
[63] See Silliman’s Journal, vol. xxxviii. p. 215, 1840.
[64] This seems to have been entirely overlooked in his suggestions respecting the nature of material atoms. It appears to me that the characteristics thus insisted upon are incompatible with the idea that each property is of itself a diffusible matter, and that in such atoms two polarities can exist inseparable from each other.
[65] Pouillet suggests that when the passage of a ray of light through glass, is influenced by a powerful magnet, agreeably to the experiments of Farraday, “consistently with the undulatory theory of light, it is the ether of the body submitted to the experiment, which would be modified by the magnetism, and that it would be very difficult to recognise whether it is modified without any participation of the ponderable matter with which it is so intimately connected.” Thus the existence of matter, composed of ethereal as well as ponderable particles, is sustained by all the evidence which has been brought to uphold the undulatory theory of light.—L. & E. Phil. Mag. &c., for 1846, vol. xxviii., page 335.
[66] The word statical has been used to designate phenomena which are the effects of electricity when at rest, as when accumulated upon conductors or the surfaces of panes or jars. Phenomena which are supposed to arise from electricity in motion (forming a current) are designated as dynamic. Thus, when charging one side of a pane produces the opposite state in the other, the effect upon the latter is ascribed to statical induction; but when a discharge of electricity through one wire, causes a current in another, forming an adjacent circuit, the result is ascribed to dynamic induction. This method of designation is employed whether the alleged current be owing to electricity generated by friction, as in the case of a machine, or generated by chemical reaction, as in the case of a galvanic battery. A good word is wanting to distinguish electricity, when produced by friction, from electricity produced by galvano-chemical reaction: for want of a better, I will resort to that employed by Noad, (frictional,) which has the advantage of being self-explanatory.
[67] As the word ether is used in various senses, the syllables “electro” being prefixed, serve to designate that which is intended.