Here we are led into another consideration, viz., whether the ether is exhausted from a receiver by pumping alone, or by the help of absorption. In his lecture, "On Radiant Matter," delivered at the British Association, at Sheffield, August 22, 1879, Dr. Crookes said: "By introducing into the tubes appropriate absorbents of residual gas, I can see that the chemical attraction goes on long after the attenuation has reached the best stage for showing the phenomena now under illustration, and I am able by this means to carry the exhaustion to much higher degrees than I get by mere pumping;" and that when working with absorbents: "The highest vacuum I have succeeded in obtaining has been 1/20,000,000th of an atmosphere, a degree which may be better understood if I say that it corresponds to about the hundredth of an inch in a barometer column three miles high." (We quote from "Engineering," Vol. XXVIII., page 188.)
Now, what are we to think? Are we to suppose that the ether was in part removed by the absorbents? We think we are justified in saying that the absorbents had not anything to do with the exhaustion of the ether, because Dr. Crookes used different kinds of absorbents for the different kinds of gases he dealt with, and it is hard to believe that all the _media_ he used were equally effective in absorbing the ether as they were with the gases. On the other hand, if we consider that the pumping was the only agent in removing the ether, we ought to acknowledge that it must have been more effective with regard to it than to the gases before absorption was resorted to with them; or that a stage had been reached at which the pump could not extract any more ether from the bulb. We shall have more to say of this presently. It is a difficult matter to determine, but there is one thing we can see clearly; when the exhaustion of the bulb was raised to 1/20,000,000th of an atmosphere, the density of the ether--of itself--must have been at a lower degree than that. Consequently if we assume its normal density to be 1/5,264,800th of an atmosphere, in terms of the estimate we quoted from "Engineering," it must have been diminished to less than one-fourth of that when the above high vacuum was obtained; because it must have been the density of the residual gas, or matter, and of the ether, added together which amounted to 1/20,000,000th; the same as we have argued with regard to the solar nebula when at 6,600,000,000 and 29,000,000 miles in diameter.