Memoirs presented to the Cambridge philosophical society on the occasion of the jubilee of Sir George Gabriel Stokes, bart., Hon. LL. D., Hon. SC. D., Lucasian professor.

196 EXPERIMENTS ON THE OSCILLATORY DISCHARGE, ETC.
In the fourth and seventh lines of this Table we give the velocity as obtained from
plates H and J. We know that in this case the effective coil and one plate of the
condenser was earthed originally, and we have therefore used the value of k calculated
on the assumption that the free coil was earthed throughout. It will be seen that the
resulting values of "v" and that obtained from the experiments with the full coil are
in close agreement, being respectively 2-98 x 1010, 2-99 x 1010 and 3-01 x 1010.
If we take the other observations for coils A and B, excluding plates H and J,
the results are not quite so satisfactory. The assumption that the free coil was insulated
leads to the values 2-94 x 1010 and 2-92 x 1010, given in lines 2 and 5 of the Table; on
the assumption that it was earthed we find from the same series of experiments the values
3'04 x 1010 and 3-02 x 1010 respectively, given in lines 3 and 6. The truth would appear to
lie between the two.
If we take the experiments with the complete coil A + B in series, we can determine
the corrections with greater accuracy, and we find as the result
v = 3'009 x 0101 centimetres per second,
while since the corrections can be calculated with more exactness in this case, we
attach far greater importance to the result.
We do not however look upon the paper as one describing a very exact method
of determining " v," but rather as a study in the oscillatory discharge of a condenser
which incidentally leads to a determination of "v" by a novel method.