is the hiding-place of the lightning, of the
electrons which moulded together make the thunderbolt. What an
underworld of mystery and power it is! In it slumbers all the might and
menace of the storm, the power that rends the earth and shakes the
heavens. With the mind's eye one can see the indivisible atoms giving up
their electrons, see the invisible hosts, in numbers beyond the power of
mathematics to compute, being summoned and marshalled by some mysterious
commander and hurled in terrible fiery phalanxes across the battlefield
of the storm.

The physicist describes the atom and talks about it as if it were "a
tangible body which one could hold in his hand like a baseball." "An
atom," Sir Oliver Lodge says, "consists of a globular mass of positive
electricity with minute negative electrons embedded in it." He speaks of
the spherical form of the atom, and of its outer surface, of its centre,
and of its passing through other atoms, and of the electrons that
revolve around its centre as planets around a sun. The electron, one
hundred thousand times smaller than an atom, yet has surface, and that
surface is a dimpled and corrugated sheet--like the cover of a mattress.
What a flight of the scientific imagination is that!

The disproportion between the size of an atom and the size of an
electron is vastly greater than that between the sun and the earth.
Represent an atom, says Sir Oliver Lodge, by a church one hundred and
sixty feet long, eighty feet broad, and forty feet high; the electrons
are like gnats inside it. Yet on the electric theory of matter,
electrons are all of the atom there is; there is no church, but only the
gnats rushing about. We know of nothing so empty and hollow, so near a
vacuum, as matter in this conception of it. Indeed, in the new physics,
matter is only a hole in the ether. Hence the newspaper joke about the
bank sliding down and leaving the woodchuck-hole sticking out, looks
like pretty good physics. The electrons give matter its inertia, and
give it the force we call cohesion, give it its toughness, its strength,
and all its other properties. They make water wet, and the diamond hard.
They are the fountain-head of the immense stores of the inter-atomic
energy, which, if it could be tapped and controlled, would so easily do
all the work of the world. But this we cannot do. "We are no more
competent," says Professor Soddy, "to make use of these supplies of
atomic energy than a savage, ignorant