The results agree as well as can be expected,
having regard to the difficulty of the experiments; the values of the
speed agree also with those which Professor Wiechert has obtained by
direct measurement.
The speed never depends on the nature of the gas contained in the
Crookes tube, but varies with the value of the fall of potential at
the cathode. It is of the order of one tenth of the speed of light,
and it may rise as high as one third. The cathode particle therefore
goes about three thousand times faster than the earth in its orbit.
The relation is also invariable, even when the substance of which the
cathode is formed is changed or one gas is substituted for another. It
is, on the average, a thousand times greater than the corresponding
relation in electrolysis. As experiment has shown, in all the
circumstances where it has been possible to effect measurements, the
equality of the charges carried by all corpuscules, ions, atoms, etc.,
we ought to consider that the charge of the electron is here, again,
that of a univalent ion in electrolysis, and therefore that its mass
is only a small fraction of that of the atom of hydrogen, viz.
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