PREGNANT SUGGESTIONS.
“It appears to me at present that ordinary and electrolytic induction are identical in their first nature, but that the latter is followed by an effect which cannot but from the nature and state of the substances take place with the former.” Then comes this pregnant suggestion:—
“Try induction through a solid crystalline body as to the consequent action on polarized light.”
By the end of a week he had begun to suspect that his magnet analogy went farther than he was at first prepared to hold. The action of a magnet was along curved lines of force. So he asks:—
“Can induction through air take place in curves or round a corner—can probably be found experimentally—if so not a radiating effect.”
After ten days more he has made another step.
“Electricity appears to exist only in polarity as in air, glass, electrolytes, etc. Now metals, being conductors, cannot take up that polar state of their own power, or rather retain it, and hence probably cannot retain developed electric forces.
* * * * *
“Metals, however, probably hold it for a moment, as other things do for a longer time; an end coming at last to all.”
This, it will be observed, is nothing more or less than Clerk Maxwell’s theory of conduction as being the breaking down of an electrostatic strain.