ABSTRACT
This chapter includes early papers written in New Zealand, at the Cavendish Laboratory and during the Montreal period (1894-1906), as well as an introduction to Lord Rutherford's early work by Sir Edward Appleton, and some reminiscences of his time in Canada by Professors H. L. Bronson and Otto Hahn. In the Philosophical Magazine of July 1905, author gave an account of some preliminary experiments on the retardation of the velocity of the particles from radium C in passing through matter. Using an active wire coated with radium C as a homogeneous source of radiation, the velocity of the particles was found to decrease in passing through aluminium, and the lowest value of the velocity observed was 064V0, where V0 is the initial velocity of projection of the particles from the bare wire. The author have recently repeated these observations under much better experimental conditions, using more active wires, and with the photographic plate closer to the source of rays.
