EDITOR'S TABLE. 



533 



those who say the present slate of things 

 should not be meddled with, and rake up 

 excuses for continuing it. It is bad to steal ; 

 it is despicable to steal from our benefactors 

 who happen to be compelled to trust us ; 

 but more despicable still is the shameless 

 Jesuitism by which an interested party will 

 seek to defend it. When listening to the 

 sneaking apologies that are put forward in 

 extenuation of such conduct, we feel as if 

 the mere common thief might rise in self- 

 respecting wrath and kick the pettifogging 

 poltroon out of his society. 



Two things in relation to copyright may 

 now be considered established as completely 

 as anything can be established by the con- 

 current usage of the civilized world. By the 

 declaration and the practice of all nations it 

 has been settled, first, that an author has a 

 right of property in his work, which gov- 

 ernment is bound to protect ; and, second, 

 that the public also has rights by which 

 those of the author are restricted. There 

 are extremists who maintain that an author's 

 rights of property are absolute and perpet- 

 ual, and other extremists who hold that 

 there can be no such thing as exclusive 

 property in ideas — just as there are tliose 

 who maintain that " all property is rob- 

 bery." Practical legislators may well as- 

 sume that these conflicting views cancel 

 each other, and may safely proceed to action 

 on the basis of broad experience and the 

 general agreement of nations. 



LOCKYEB 02^ THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS. 



Mr. Lookyee's paper before the 

 Eoyal Society on the compound nature 

 of some of the so-called elements from 

 the point of view of spectrum analysis 

 has attracted the attention properly 

 due to the eminence of the investigator 

 in the latter field, but chemists will be 

 slow to admit that the experimental as- 

 pect of the subject has been much al- 

 tered by Mr. Lockyer's investigations. 

 The a-priori grounds for believing that 

 the so-called elements are not elemen- 

 tary were already strong. In fact the 

 progress of chemistry had proved many 

 substances to be compound which were 

 previously ranked as elements, and left 

 the list of simple bodies to consist of 

 such only as have hitherto resisted 

 analysis. It has long been believed that 



the relations among the atomic num- 

 bers furnish strong evidence of the 

 compound nature of many substances 

 classed as elementary; and spectrum 

 analysis has served greatly to heighten 

 this probability. When, a few years 

 ago, Dr. Martineau made an assault 

 upon the doctrine of evolution, one of 

 his objections to it was that the uni- 

 verse started a long way ahead on the 

 line of heterogeneity by its outfit of 

 chemical elements ; the implication be- 

 ing tliat these elements had to be sep- 

 arately created before evolution could 

 begin. To this, Herbert Spencer co- 

 gently replied that the elements are 

 not Tcnown to be elementary ; that no 

 intelligent cliemist holds them to be 

 absolutely so; and that many concur- 

 rent considerations compel the infer- 

 ence that they are compounded, and 

 perhaps recompounded of a few and 

 perhaps of a single primordial constit- 

 uent. The bearings of spectroscopic 

 research upon the question were thus 

 stated : " Spectrum analysis yields re- 

 sults wholly irreconcilable with the 

 assumption that the conventionally 

 named simple substances are really sim- 

 ple. Each yields a spectrum having 

 lines varying in number from two to 

 eight^^ or more, every one of which im- 

 plies the intercepting of ethereal un- 

 dulations of a certain order, by some- 

 thing oscillating in unison or in har- 

 mony with them. "Were iron absolutely 

 elementary, it is not conceivable that 

 its action could intercept ethereal un- 

 diilations of eighty diff'erent orders: 

 though it does not follow that its mol- 

 ecule contains as many separate atoms 

 as there are lines in the spectrum, it 

 must clearly be a complex molecule. 

 Still more clearly is this general im- 

 plication confirmed by facts furnished 

 by nitrogen, the spectrum of which 

 has two quite difi'erent sets of lines, 

 and changes from one set to the other 

 as the temperature is varied. The ev- 

 idence thus gained points to the con- 

 chision that, out of some primordial 

 units, the so-called elements arise, by 



