Lenard
himself, however, with that absence of even involuntary prejudice
common to all great minds, undertook to demonstrate that the opinion
he at first held could no longer be accepted, and succeeded in
repeating the experiment of M. Perrin on cathode rays in the air and
even _in vacuo_.
On the wrecks of the two contradictory hypotheses thus destroyed, and
out of the materials from which they had been built, a theory has been
constructed which co-ordinates all the known facts. This theory is
furthermore closely allied to the theory of ionisation, and, like this
latter, is based on the concept of the electron. Cathode rays are
electrons in rapid motion.
The phenomena produced both inside and outside a Crookes tube are,
however, generally complex. In Lenard's first experiments, and in many
others effected later when this region of physics was still very
little known, a few confusions may be noticed even at the present day.
At the spot where the cathode rays strike the walls of the tube the
essentially different X rays appear.
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