Several other methods have been employed to estimate the size of molecules. One of these is based upon the phenomena of contact electricity; another upon the wave-theory of light; and another upon capillary attraction, as shown in the tense film of a soap-bubble! No one of these methods gives results more definite than that due to the kinetic theory of gases, just outlined; but the important thing is that the results obtained by these different methods (all of them due to Lord Kelvin) agree with one another in fixing the dimensions of the molecule at somewhere about the limits already mentioned. We may feel very sure indeed, therefore, that the molecules of matter are not the unextended, formless points which Boscovich and his followers of the eighteenth century thought them. But all this, it must be borne in mind, refers to the molecule, not to the ultimate particle of matter, about which we shall have more to say in another connection. Curiously enough, we shall find that the latest theories as to the final term of the series are not so very far afield from the dreamings of the eighteenth-century philosophers; the electron of J. J. Thompson shows many points of resemblance to the formless centre of Boscovich. Whatever the exact form of the molecule, its outline is subject to incessant variation; for nothing in molecular science is regarded as more firmly established than that the molecule, under all ordinary circumstances, is in a state of intense but variable vibration. The entire energy of a molecule of gas, for example, is not measured by its momentum, but by this plus its energy of vibration and rotation, due to the collisions already referred to. Clausius has even estimated the relative importance of these two quantities, showing that the translational motion of a molecule of gas accounts for only three-fifths of its kinetic energy. The total energy of the molecule (which we call "heat") includes also another factor--namely, potential energy, or energy of position, due to the work that has been done on expanding, in overcoming external pressure, and internal attraction between the molecules themselves. This potential energy (which will be recovered when the gas contracts) is the "latent heat" of Black, which so long puzzled the philosophers. It is latent in the same sense that the energy of a ball thrown into the air is latent at the moment when the ball poises at its greatest height before beginning to fall.