6oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS. 



By J. NOEMAN LOCKYER, F. K. S. 



I HAVE recently announced to the Royal Society that, reasoning 

 from the phenomena presented to us in the spectroscope when 

 known compounds are decomposed, I have obtained evidence that the 

 so-called elementary bodies are in reality compound ones. 



Although the announcement took this form, the interest taken in 

 science nowadays by the general public is so great that it is apt to 

 travel beyond the record ; and, as able editors are not content to wait 

 for what the experimentalist himself has to say, they are often at the 

 mercy of those who, perhaps more from misapprehension than anything 

 else, are prepared to provide columns filled with statements wide of the 

 mark. Nor is this all. If there he a practical side to the work, some 

 " application of science " is brought to the front, and the worker's own 

 view of his labor is twisted out of all truth. 



This has happened in my case. The idea of simplifying the ele- 

 ments is connected with the philosopher's stone. The use of the 

 philosopher's stone was to transmute metals ; therefore I have been 

 supposed to be " transmuting " metals ; and imaginations have been so 

 active in this direction that I am not sure that, when my paper was 

 eventually read at the Royal Society, many were not disappointed that 

 I did not incontinently then and there " transmute " a ton of lead into 

 a ton of gold. 



It is in consequence of this general misapprehension of the nature 

 of my work, that I the more willingly meet the wishes of the editor 

 that I should say something about it. The paper itself I need not 

 reproduce, as it has appeared in extenso elsewhere * ; but there are 

 many points touching both the origin of the views I have advanced and 

 the work which has led up to them, -on which I am glad of the oppor- 

 tunity of addressing a wider public. 



It is now upward of ten years since I began a series of observations 

 having for their object the determination of the chemical constitution 

 of the atmosphere of the sun. The work done, so far as the number 

 of elementary substances found to exist in it, I summed up in a for- 

 mer article ^ ; but the ten years' work had opened up a great number 

 of problems above and beyond the question of the number of elements 

 which exist in the solar atmosphere, because we were dealing with ele- 

 ments under conditions which it is impossible to represent and experi- 

 ment on here. 



In the first place, the temperature of the sun is beyond all definition ; 

 secondl}^, the vapors are not confined ; and, thirdly, there is an enor- 



' " American Journal of Science and Arts." 



^ Printed in the " Popular Science Monthly Supplement" for August, ISYS. 



