38 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



of life are understandable on catalytic principles, including selec- 

 tive adsorption and differential diffusion. But the mental and 

 spiritual phenomena which emerge, and which are just as real as 

 the material ones, are as inscrutable as ever. 



REFERENCES 



1 For further historical aspects, reference must be made to books on the history of 

 science, e.g., that of Sir William C. Dampier (3rd ed., Macmillan Co., New York, 

 1944). 



-'Stoney's original papers are in Proc. Brit. Assoc. Adv. Science, Belfast meeting, 

 1874, and in Trans. Roy. Dublin Soc, (1891), 4, 583. See also "The Electron Theory" 

 by Fournier d'Albe, London, 1907. 



3 Comptes rendus, July, 1898, "On a New Radioactive Substance Contained in 

 Pitchblende." 



4 English translation by Victor Sheean, Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1937. 



5 "On the Occurrence of Nitrogen in Uraninite and on the Composition of 

 Uraninite in General," U. S. Geol. Bull., 78, 43-79 (1889-90). 



5a About 1865 the great Belgian chemist Jean Servais Stas wrote: "I have arrived 

 at the absolute conviction, the complete certainty, so far as is possible for a human 

 being to attain to certainty in such matters, that the law of Prout is nothing but 

 an illusion, a mere speculation definitely contradicted by experience." (It should 

 be stated, however, that shortly before his death in 1891, on noting the close 

 approximation to integers shown by a number of atomic weights when hydrogen 

 is taken as unity, Stas remarked: "II faut croire qu'il y a quelque chose la-dessous.") 

 But in 1932 Soddy wrote: "After many vicissitudes and the most convincing apparent 

 disproofs, the hypothesis thrown out so lightly in 1815 by Prout, an Edinburgh 

 physician, has a century later become the corner-stone of modern theories of the 

 structure of atoms. There is something surely akin to, if not transcending tragedy 

 in the fate that has overtaken the life work of that distinguished galaxy of 

 nineteenth century chemists, rightly revered by their contemporaries as representing 

 the crown and perfection of accurate scientific measurement. Their hard-won 

 results, for the moment at least, appear as of little interest and significance as the 

 determination of the average weight of a collection of bottles, some of them full 

 and some of them more or less empty." 



6 Isotopes of tin: 



7 In his book "Classical and Modern Physics" p. 564, New York, D. Van Nostrand 

 Co., 1940. 



8 See his extensive historical review in Science, 1946, 103, 289-302. 



9 The reader must consult special books and journal articles regarding these 

 matters, and also about mesons, cosmic rays, and other developments. 



