But in all probability the ether is, in its objective reality, much more simple, and has a better right to be considered as fundamental.
We cannot therefore, without being very illogical, define the ether by material properties, and it is useless labour, condemned beforehand to sterility, to endeavour to determine it by other qualities than those of which experiment gives us direct and exact knowledge.
The ether is defined when we know, in all its points, and in magnitude and in direction, the two fields, electric and magnetic, which may exist in it.

These two fields may vary; we speak from habit of a movement propagated in the ether, but the phenomenon within the reach of experiment is the propagation of these variations.
Since the electrons, considered as a modification of the ether symmetrically distributed round a point, perfectly counterfeit that inertia which is the fundamental property of matter, it becomes very tempting to suppose that matter itself is composed of a more or less complex assemblage of electrified centres in motion.
This complexity is, in general, very great, as is demonstrated by the examination of the luminous spectra produced by the atoms, and it is precisely because of the compensations produced between the different movements that the essential properties of matter--the law of the conservation of inertia, for example--are not contrary to the hypothesis.
The forces of cohesion thus would be due to the mutual attractions which occur in the electric and magnetic fields produced in the interior of bodies; and it is even conceivable that there may be produced, under the influence of these actions, a tendency to determine orientation, that is to say, that a reason can be seen why matter may be crystallised.[50] [Footnote 50: The reader should, however, be warned that a theory has lately been put forth which attempts to account for crystallisation on purely mechanical grounds.

See Messrs Barlow and Pope's "Development of the Atomic Theory" in the _Transactions of the Chemical Society_, 1906 .-- ED.] All the experiments effected on the conductivity of gases or metals, and on the radiations of active bodies, have induced us to regard the atom as being constituted by a positively charged centre having practically the same magnitude as the atom itself, round which the electrons gravitate; and it might evidently be supposed that this positive centre itself preserves the fundamental characteristics of matter, and that it is the electrons alone which no longer possess any but electromagnetic mass.
We have but little information concerning these positive particles, though they are met with in an isolated condition, as we have seen, in the canal rays or in the X rays.[51] It has not hitherto been possible to study them so successfully as the electrons themselves; but that their magnitude causes them to produce considerable perturbations in the bodies on which they fall is manifest by the secondary emissions which complicate and mask the primitive phenomenon.

There are, however, strong reasons for thinking that these positive centres are not simple.

Thus Professor Stark attributes to them, with experiments in proof of his opinion, the emission of the spectra of the rays in Geissler tubes, and the complexity of the spectrum discloses the complexity of the centre.