Nevertheless throughout these years, on the whole so unfavourable to its existence, there persisted the idea of a common origin of the distinct kinds of matter known to chemists. Indeed, this idea of unity in substance in nature seems to accord with some innate desire or intimate structure of the human mind. As Mr Arthur Balfour well puts it, "There is no a priori reason that I know of for expecting that the material world should be a modification of a single medium, rather than a composite structure built out of sixty or seventy elementary substances, eternal and eternally different. Why then should we feel content with the first hypothesis and not with the second? Yet so it is. Men of science have always been restive under the multiplication of entities. They have eagerly watched for any sign that the different chemical elements own a common origin, and are all compounded out of some primordial substance. Nor, for my part, do I think that such instincts should be ignored...that they exist is certain; that they modify the indifferent impartiality of pure empiricism can hardly be denied." ("Report of the 74th Meeting of the British Association" (Presidential Address, Cambridge 1904), page 9, London, 1905.)

When Dalton's atomic theory had been in existence some half century, it was noted that certain numerical relations held good between the atomic weights of elements chemically similar to one another. Thus the weight (88) of an atom of strontium compared with that of hydrogen as unity, is about the mean of those of calcium (40) and barium (137). Such relations, in this and other chemical groups, were illustrated by Beguyer de Chancourtois in 1862 by the construction of a spiral diagram in which the atomic weights are placed in order round a cylinder and elements chemically similar are found to fall on vertical lines.

Newlands seems to have been the first to see the significance of such a diagram. In his "law of octaves," formulated in 1864, he advanced the hypothesis that, if arranged in order of rising atomic weight, the elements fell into groups, so that each eighth element was chemically similar. Stated thus, the law was too definite; no room was left for newly- discovered elements, and some dissimilar elements were perforce grouped together.

But in 1869 Mendeleeff developed Newland's hypothesis in a form that attracted at once general attention. Placing the elements in order of rising atomic weight, but leaving a gap where necessary to bring similar elements into vertical columns, he obtained a periodic table with natural vacancies to be filled as new elements were discovered, and with a certain amount of flexibility at the ends of the horizontal lines. From the position of the vacancies, the general chemical and physical properties of undiscovered elements could be predicted, and the success of such predictions gave a striking proof of the usefulness of Mendeleeff's generalisation.

When the chemical and physical properties of the elements were known to be periodic functions of their atomic weights, the idea of a common origin and common substance became much more credible. Differences in atomic weight and differences in properties alike might reasonably be explained by the differences in the amount of the primordial substance present in the various atoms; an atom of oxygen being supposed to be composed of sixteen times as much stuff as the atom of hydrogen, but to be made of the same ultimate material. Speculations about the mode of origin of the elements now began to appear, and put on a certain air of reality. Of these speculations perhaps the most detailed was that of Crookes, who imagined an initial chaos of a primordial medium he named protyle, and a process of periodic change in which the chemical elements successively were precipitated.

From another side too, suggestions were put forward by Sir Norman Lockyer and others that the differences in spectra observed in different classes of stars, and produced by different conditions in the laboratory, were to be explained by changes in the structure of the vibrating atoms.

The next step in advance gave a theoretical basis for the idea of a common structure of matter, and was taken in an unexpected direction. Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light, accepted in England, was driven home to continental minds by the confirmatory experiments of Hertz, who in 1888 detected and measured the electromagnetic waves that Maxwell had described twenty years earlier. But, if light be an electromagnetic phenomenon, the light waves radiated by hot bodies must take their origin in the vibrations of electric systems. Hence within the atoms must exist electric charges capable of vibration. On these lines Lorentz and Larmor have developed an electronic theory of matter, which is imagined in its essence to be a conglomerate of electric charges, with electro-magnetic inertia to explain mechanical inertia. (Larmor, "Aether and Matter", Cambridge, 1900.) The movement of electric charges would be affected by a magnetic field, and hence the discovery by Zeeman that the spectral lines of sodium were doubled by a strong magnetic force gave confirmatory evidence to the theory of electrons.

Then came J.J. Thomson's great discovery of minute particles, much smaller than any chemical atom, forming a common constituent of many different kinds of matter. (Thomson, "Conduction of Electricity through Gases" (2nd edition), Cambridge, 1906.) If an electric discharge be passed between metallic terminals through a glass vessel containing air at very low pressure, it is found that rectilinear rays, known as cathode rays, proceed from the surface of the cathode or negative terminal. Where these rays strike solid objects, they give rise to the Rontgen rays now so well known; but it is with the cathode rays themselves that we are concerned. When they strike an insulated conductor, they impart to it a negative charge, and Thomson found that they were deflected from their path both by magnetic and electric forces in the direction in which negatively electrified particles would be deflected. Cathode rays then were accepted as flights of negatively charged particles, moving with high velocities. The electric and magnetic deflections give two independent measurements which may be made on a cathode ray, and both the deflections involve theoretically three unknown quantities, the mass of the particles, their electric charge and their velocity. There is strong cumulative evidence that all such particles possess the same charge, which is identical with that associated with a univalent atom in electrolytic liquids. The number of unknown quantities was thus reduced to two--the mass and the velocity. The measurement of the magnetic and electric deflections gave two independent relations between the unknowns, which could therefore be determined. The velocities of the cathode ray particles were found to vary round a value about one-tenth that of light, but the mass was found always to be the same within the limits of error, whatever the nature of the terminals, of the residual gas in the vessel, and of the conditions of the experiment. The mass of a cathode ray particle, or corpuscle, as Thomson, adopting Newton's name, called it, is about the eight-hundredth part of the mass of a hydrogen atom.