ARE THE ELEMENTS TRANSMIT ABLE? 41 



by Dalton and retained by succeeding chemists and physicists for no 

 good reason. Perhaps because imitation is a characteristic inherited 

 from our simian ancestry, and is so much easier for us than originality. 

 Many a chemist looks askance at any tampering with the atoms, 

 apparently fearing that it may hurt them, or even destroy them utterly 

 and the atomic weights with them. Or he trembles for his spidery 

 and tenuous structural formula?, knowing full well that if deprived of 

 these he will be irretrievably lost in a labyrinth, without a thread to 

 guide him. While, if he is not permitted to think of the carbon atom 

 as a little chunk of matter, tetrahedral in form, he thinks he is 

 launched on a sea of troubles. 



, But all this apprehension arises from a misunderstanding. That 

 the atomic weights remain unharmed and unaltered, as the units for 

 chemical calculations, and that nothing which is good or useful about 

 the atomic theory is destroyed or even assailed by the new ideas, that 

 the trend of these new ideas is unmistakably constructive and not 

 destructive, are best shown by a review of the arguments in favor of 

 the hypothesis that the atom is divisible, and that our elements are 

 not elements in the true sense of the word. 



There is nothing new in this view ; it formed the first article of the 

 faith of the alchemists. It was unqualifiedly denied by Dalton, and 

 fell into such disrepute that even within recent years one risked being 

 called a dreamer, or even a fool, if he dared to consider it possible. 

 Here again is an instance of the desirability of being as precise as pos- 

 sible in the use of terms. Many believe experimental evidence of the 

 complexity of ' elementary atoms ' and the existence of one ' mother 

 substance ' must be followed immediately by directions for transform- 

 ing elements into one another; by the transmutation of baser metals 

 into gold. But these are two wholly distinct propositions. An 

 astronomer might locate a mountain of gold on the surface of the 

 moon, but there would still be a goodly chasm to bridge before he 

 derived much material benefit from his discovery ! 



The idea that there is one fundamental substance would not down. 

 The hypothesis of the English physician, Prout, is a familiar one. 

 When the atomic weight of hydrogen is set equal to unity, the atomic 

 weights of all the other elements come out remarkably close to whole 

 numbers. There exist numerous groups of three elements, commonly 

 called Dobereiner's triads, the individual members of one group being 

 similar in their chemical properties, and so related that the atomic 

 weight of the middle member is the arithmetic mean of the atomic 

 weights of the extreme members. These are the facts which led Prout 

 to suggest that there was but one element, namely, hydrogen, the others 

 being complexes containing different quantities of this ultimate sub- 

 stance. It followed that the differences between the atomic weights 

 and whole numbers were to be ascribed to experimental errors in the 



