"[A]ll these successive triumphs of research, Dalton’s, Kirchhoff’s, Mendeléeff’s, greatly as they have added to our store of knowledge, have gone but little way to solve the problem which the elementary atoms have for centuries presented to mankind. What the atom of each element is, whether it is a movement, or a thing, or a vortex, or a point having inertia, whether there is any limit to its divisibility, and, if so, how that limit is imposed, whether the long list of elements is final, or whether any of them have any common origin, all these questions remain surrounded by a darkness as profound as ever. The dream which lured the alchemists to their tedious labours, and which may be said to have called chemistry into being, has assuredly not been realised, but it has not yet been refuted. The boundary of our knowledge in this direction remains where it was many centuries ago. The next discussion... to find unsolved riddles which have hitherto defined the scrutiny of science, would be the question of... the ether. The ether occupies a highly anomalous position in the world of science. It may be described as a half-discovered entity. I dare not use any less pedantic word than entity to designate it, for it would be a great exaggeration of our knowledge if I were to speak of it as a body or even as a substance. When nearly a century ago Young and Fresnel discovered that the motions of an incandescent particle were conveyed to our eyes by undulation, it followed that between our eyes and the particle there must be something to undulate. In order to furnish that something, the notion of the ether was conceived, and for more than two generations the main, if not the only, function of the word ether has been to furnish a nominative case to the verb 'to undulate.' Lately, our conception of this entity has received a notable extension. One of the most brilliant of the services which Professor Maxwell has rendered to science has been the discovery that the figure which expressed the velocity of light also expressed the multiplier required to change the measure of static or passive electricity into that of dynamic or active electricity. The interpretation... is that, as light and the electric impulse move approximately at the same rate through space, it is probable that the undulations which convey them are undulations of the same medium. And as induced electricity penetrates through everything, or nearly everything, it follows that the ether through which its undulations are propagated must pervade all , whether empty or full, whether occupied by opaque matter or transparent matter, or by no matter at all. The attractive experiments by which the late Professor Herz illustrated the electric vibrations of the ether will only be alluded to by me... But the mystery of the ether... remains even more inscrutable than before. Of this all-pervading entity we know absolutely nothing except that it can be made to undulate. ...And even its solitary function of undulating, ether performs in an abnormal fashion which has caused infinite perplexity. All s that we know transmit any blow they have received by waves which undulate backwards and forwards in the path of their own advance. The ether undulates athwart the path of the wave’s advance. The genius of Lord Kelvin has recently discovered... a labile state of equilibrium, in which a fluid that is infinite in its extent may exist, and may undulate in this eccentric fashion without outraging the laws of mathematics. ...[I]t leaves our knowledge of the ether in a very rudimentary condition. It has no known qualities except one, and that quality is in the highest degree anomalous and inscrutable. ...It is not easy to fit in the theory of electrical ether waves with the phenomena of positive and negative electricity, and as to the true significance and cause of those counteracting and complementary forces, to which we give the provisional names of negative and positive, we know about as much now as Franklin knew a century and a half ago."