Sometimes
elongated masses of the substance refused to set equatorially,
sometimes they set persistently oblique, and sometimes even, like a
magnetic body, from pole to pole.
'The effect,' he says, 'occurs at a single pole; and it is then
striking to observe a long piece of a substance so diamagnetic as
bismuth repelled, and yet at the same moment set round with force,
axially, or end on, as a piece of magnetic substance would do.'
The effect perplexed him; and in his efforts to release himself from
this perplexity, no feature of this new manifestation of force
escaped his attention. His experiments are described in a memoir
communicated to the Royal Society on December 7, 1848.
I have worked long myself at magne-crystallic action, amid all the
light of Faraday's and Plucker's researches. The papers now before
me were objects of daily and nightly study with me eighteen or
nineteen years ago; but even now, though their perusal is but the
last of a series of repetitions, they astonish me. Every
circumstance connected with the subject; every shade of deportment;
every variation in the energy of the action; almost every
application which could possibly be made of magnetism to bring out
in detail the character of this new force, is minutely described.
The field is swept clean, and hardly anything experimental is left
for the gleaner. The phenomena, he concludes, are altogether
different from those of magnetism or diamagnetism: they would appear,
in fact, to present to us 'a new force, or a new form of force,
in the molecules of matter,' which, for convenience sake, he designates
by a new word, as 'the magne-crystallic force.
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