242 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it will be the most stunning fact that has come into science for a hun- 

 dred years. The nebula theory, the doctrine of evolution, and the 

 antiquity of man will be trifles compared with its significance. 



Chemistry, though, with or without that fact, has a wonderful field 

 where one may work intelligently in a constructive way. Compounds 

 both inorganic and organic have been produced in great variety, and 

 some chemists are at work trying to make artificially many things 

 which one has to depend upon nature for now — thus quinine, now 

 used in such great quantity; others are sugar or albumen for food, or 

 nitrates for fertilizers, and so on. All these products, if produced on 

 a commercial scale, would be of enormous worth to the world. Aside 

 from these the chemical preparation of antitoxins for the relief and 

 cure of many diseases, cholera, plague, yellow-fever, typhoid fever, 

 are all being sought for with a great probability that they will be 

 discovered and the life of men be saved for many years. I wish I 

 could say that if life be saved and kept by such artificial means that 

 mankind would not seek other ways of decimating its ranks. The 

 average life of the Jews is upwards of seventy years. If all men had 

 the same degree of vitality the world would be so crowded in a hundred 

 or two hundred years that only the loss of fertility would save the neces- 

 sity for famine, war and pestilence. Chemistry may give us a boon and 

 leave nature to find some other resource for reducing numbers. That 

 such resource would be radically different from her past methods is 

 not very probable. 



Physics is that science which is concerned with transformable en- 

 ergy and its transformations under all kinds of conditions. The 

 energy may be* mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, gravitational, 

 physiological or mental. So long as they are transformable they are 

 all departments of physics. The nineteenth century correlated them 

 all and showed the conditions for transformation and the nature of 

 several forms, thus heat, as vibratory atomic and molecular motion, 

 radiant energy a wave motion in the ether. The discovery of the 

 ether and many of its phenomena belongs also to it. The development 

 of many arts and industries followed the new knowledge, so we have 

 now, for instance, the electrical industries in many ways, the spectro- 

 scope and its astronomical revelations, the telescope grown from a 

 four inch objective to a four foot objective. 



The old ideas of the nature of matter or of atoms have all been 

 abandoned and we have come to the conclusion that matter is not inert 

 but is loaded with energy, that indeed the ether is saturated with it, 

 though it is available to us only through the agency of matter, which 

 acts as a transformer and a distributor of it. Yet we need to know 

 much more of it. There is more to be learned about chemistry in its 

 relation to physics than any seems to have considered hitherto. It is 

 the form of energy which is present in atoms. Thus when hydrogen 



