"It became therefore more and more evident that the radiations of uranium were only, as I said from the very first, a particular case of a very general law.

This general law, which I have not ceased to study, is as follows:- Under divers influences, light, chemical reaction, electric action, and often even, spontaneously, the atoms of simple bodies, as well as those of compound bodies, dissociate and emit effluves of the same family as the cathode rays.

25

This generalization is at the present day almost universally admitted, but the preceding statement of facts shows that, it needed some courage to formulate it for the first time. Who could have supposed any relationship between the radiations of uranium and any effluves whatever, cathodic or otherwise, since nearly all physicists then admitted, on M. Becquerel's authority, the polarization and the refraction of these rays?" [The Evolution of Matter, page 24-25]