  Berzelius's conjectures about the electrical nature of chemical combination owed their plausibility to the phenomenon of electrolysis, and especially the laws governing it discovered by Faraday, which linked the weights of chemicals deposited in electrolysis to chemical equivalents. But evidence for the details of his atomistic theory independent of the evidence for the experimental laws that the theory was designed to support was still lacking. Contemporaries of Berzelius proposed other atomic theories to explain electrical properties of matter. Ampère proposed electrical currents in atoms to explain magnetism and Poisson showed how electrostatic induction could be explained by assuming atomic dipoles. In each of these cases some new hypothesis was added to atomism for which there was no evidence independent of the phenomenon explained. Nevertheless, the fact that there existed this range of possible explanations all assuming the existence of atoms can be seen as constituting evidence for atoms by those favouring inferences to the best explanation.