"anes AND. Rays." By Sir Oliver Emnest Benn. 213, Siv Oliver Lodge is a writer on scientific subjects who has the great gift of making his readers feel that they are taking part in an exciting exploration, He has now written a book on the structure of the atom, which, though the average novel reader may find it difficult to follow, will afford a great deal of pleasure to ordinary men who are willing to do a little brain-work. The ordinary man has not yet realized that the atom is a sort of Solar System in miniature. There is a central nucleus round which electrons elrculate "very much as the planets revolve round the sun."
It is a strange fact that science, which two or three generation ago was making war on the incredible, has in recent years introduced us to a world which would seem to many people to be infinitely more incredible than the Garden of Eden. The non-scientific man can scarcely help thinking of the atom as some thing perfectly solid, Sir Oliver Lodge tells him that, on the contrary, an atom, like the Solar System, consists mainly of empty space. "An electrical particle discharged into an atom would be just as unlikely to hit one of the partie cles of which the atom is composed a huge projectile hurled into the Solar System would be to hit one of the planets or the sun. So great in proportion is the amount of space compared with the amount of matter ju an atom that Sir Oliver asserts that "if all the electrical par-tides which compose a human body could be violently compressed into absolute contact, the bulk would be reduced to a billionth part." such circumstances, indeed, 16 stone would "occupy only a fraction of cubic, millimetre instend of 22 gallons."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.