thing, like one of those French clown dolls with a cymbal at the end of each wooden arm, and his hands were limp as a duck's feet. Try it, with your hands flapping and your wrists limp . . . that way. . . and eyes wide open. "And right there was something the nurse hadn't told me about. Nurses are so accurate on temperature charts and that sort of thing and so blind really. Eyes wide open, mind you, and simply enthralled. All kinds of sight in them, too, if you know what I mean. But, above all, an expression of the most magical, the most ecstatic delight. That was the strangest of it. I wasn't prepared for that. Kinkead couldn't have known about it, because—well, because he couldn't possibly have lied about anything so vitally real as that self-evident, irrepressible delight. He looked a bond-selling, cherubic fool suddenly vouchsafed a glimpse of paradise. . "Shan't I waken him?' The nurse wakened me. 'He's kept it up for three minutes now. It's the veronal, of course, but, even so, it tires him dreadfully if it isn't stopped.' "That roused me, for I give you my word I'd never seen anything like it, and I was considerably dashed. I turned on the light and it made no difference. We had to hold his arms. He's a powerful chap and it took some effort. That was odd, too, because I noticed that his shoulder muscles didn't seem to be much exerted. I had half the feeling that I was struggling with some one else for the mastery of his wrists." "That is odd." I admitted. "I thought so," Adams continued, "and, what's more, the feeling didn't leave me until we had awakened him and stopped the whole ghastly show. And we had to slap him to waken him. Without that we could make no impression on him." "What then?" I asked. "Oh," said Adams, "he cried, course. They mostly do." "Was that all?" of "All?" Adams laughed. "You would have thought it quite enough had you seen it." took him off in no time. But at twelveforty-five we had exactly the same entertainment again. A third performance began at two minutes past three, a fourth at four-ten and a fifth at five. The fifth had hardly started before he wakened himself. The veronal was wearing off.". "Five times!" I cried. "Do you wonder," Adams said gravely, "that the man's a wreck?" I hazarded a solution for myself. "Have you ever read Bulwer's "The House and the Brain'?" I asked. Adams is hardly the man for Victorian fiction. "But it's a possibility with which you ought to reckon," I insisted, after I had outlined Bulwer's melodrama masterpiece. "Some modern Mesmer performing a wicked experiment on your broker, who seems the perfectly unresisting type . . . performing a wicked experiment or taking a wicked revenge." Adams wasn't much impressed with Bulwer's respect for mesmerism. Adams said: "I had almost rather believe something else altogether, something entirely outside my province, something quite simple, too, if you don't mind what you believe." "What will that be?" I pressed him. "I told you about the look on his face," Adams answered slowly, "the really exquisite and breathless delight of his expression during the spell or seizure, or whatever you choose to call it. Well, after the third crisis, when I could be quite certain of my own nerves, I asked the nurse if she had noticed anything else. Something quite separate from any of us three in the room.' " "Had she noticed anything?" "No, and she explained my reaction to her own satisfaction but not at all to mine. I'm just a bit too seasoned for some things. And after the last riot at five in the morning, I was pretty nearly sure." The click came in my mind which tells me always when Adams and I are thinking the same thought. I snapped up the point. "Then the cause is outside," I cried. "Not to be looked for in him at all-not even in his subconsciousness." Adams demurred. "I won't let you Adams went no more to Boston but, rather feebly, as he admitted, prescribed the West Indies. The Kinkeads, brother and sister, journeyed down there and took the nurse with them. Bermuda, I think it was at first, and later they moved to Porto Rico for greater quiet. The nurse wrote reports. No improvement. "It isn't an ordinary breakdown," I said to Adams. "Who ever said it was?" said he. In six weeks or so the Kinkeads returned suddenly, not to Boston this time, but to Adams's own sanitarium in Jersey, and I had new chapters from day to day, and the end. "Miss Minna's fairly desperate," Adams reported. "Clutches my hand now and cries: 'For God's sake, doctor!" She's lost all her fine majesty and Victorian bearing. She's cleaned out and only wants her brother saved. I shall have to find them another nurse, too. My stolid old stand-by can't hold up any longer." The case had indeed taken a darker turn. Kinkead, looking an old man now, had lost the last of his daytime respite. The seizures came upon him waking or sleeping, without warning, without mercy, and carried his sense away from his surroundings into some other place, of which, afterward, no trace of recollection remained, but where, at almost any time of day or night, his despairing sister could watch him moving and acting a about some very definite and in hensible business. Adams didn't know which wa the old thing or this latest pha was bad enough," he admitted, " and in bed, and when he devel stage of getting up out of his bed ting on the edge for his performa ting there and acting that way i jamas, with his hair tousled and bare, it was bad, too. But to now move suddenly about his my affairs in broad daylight, fully clo evidently and normally and quie ing the time of his life, and ap fully conscious of what he is do certainly remembering nothing of did afterward, it's rather by way It made me shudder to hear of must be horrible!" Adams laughed suddenly. der line," he remarked, "between horror and grotesque ridiculou pretty easily crossed. I stand s as I watch him and I have to ma effort to suppress my guffaws." "What does he have to say for after the things are over?" I ask "Nothing any more," Adams "His only strength seems to be s Between them he the seizures. terribly sick. You can't blame that. And it can't last much lo "Why don't you restrain force?" I had been wondering some time. Adams shook his head rather s "My one experiment with the jacket nearly did for him. The to be plenty of fatal energy abou after him. I don't have to help "Good heavens," I shouted. mean to say that he is actually die of this absurd business?" "For all I can do, he is," said "Better men have died for less You'll admit that." But it was a staggering thing “ཀཱ template. A man dying this w this extraordinary way.. of it," I reflected aloud, "sittin just as though he were in a theat "Just as though he were wat play," Adams corrected. "But to see him . . . apparently fully conscious of what he is doing, and remembering nothing of what he did afterward, it's rather by way of being hellish."-Page 72. I said. "It must be." 99 "The strangest lunacy that ever was,' "It would be," said Adams, "if it were "That's for you to guess." The best that Adams could do was to ease the man's final confinement. He You had been content enough all winter long To dream of old seafarers valiant in song, But now you cry for a way through the restless foaming, And foreign roadsteads at the end of an earth-wide roaming Now you walk down by the shipyards and each tall mast And you learn your love for the ocean and all of its vast Ever since men launched the Argo it has been so. "t they? And The Electron and the Light-Quant WHAT ARE THEY? BY ROBERT ANDREWS MILLIKAN Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923; Author of "Gulliver's Travels in Science," etc. Sometimes it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both-by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on or beyond, and so on in unending alternations. The terms of this year's award state that it is given "for work on the fundamental electrical unit and on photoelectricity." In both fields my own work has been that of the mere experimenter whose main task has been to devise, if possible, certain crucial experiments for testing the validity or invalidity of conceptions advanced by others. The conception of electrical particles or atoms goes back a hundred and seventy years to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, about 1750: "The electrical matter consists of particles extremely subtle since it can permeate common matter, even the densest, with such freedom and ease as not to receive any appreciable resistance." This theoretical conception was developed in no little detail by Wilhelm Weber in papers written in 1871. The numerical value of the ultimate electrical unit was first definitely estimated by G. Johnstone Stoney in 1881, and in 1891 this same This is the Nobel Address, hitherto unpublished. de physicist gave to it the name "the electron." In 1897 the experimental foot came forward with J. J. Thomson's and Zeeman's determinations of the so-called ratio of charge to mass-by two wholly distinct methods. It was these experiments and others like them which in a few years gained nearly universal acceptance among physicists for the electron theory. There remained, however, some doubters, even among those of scientific credentials, for at least two decades-men who adopted the view that the apparent unitary character of electricity was but a statistical phenomenon. And as for educated people of the non-scientific sort, there exists to-day among them a very general and a very serious misconception as to the character of the present evidence. A prominent literary writer recently spoke of the electron as "only the latest scientific hypothesis which will in its turn give way to the abracadabra of to-morrow." It is perhaps not inappropriate then to attempt to review to-day as precisely as possible a few features of the existing experimental situation and to endeavor to distinguish as sharply as may be between theory and some newly established facts. The most direct and unambiguous proof of the existence of the electron will probably be generally admitted to be found in an experiment which for convenience I shall call the "oil-drop experiment." But before discussing the significance of that advance I must ask you to bear with me while I give the experimentalists' answer to the very fundamental but very familiar query: "What is electricity?" His answer is naïve and definite. He admits at once that as to the |