258 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Atom, we must either agree with Thomson and Helmholtz 

 in attributing the formation of Matter to possibilities that 

 no longer exist to-day in our System, or to another possibility 

 that cannot be overlooked — namely, that the formation of Matter 

 as an overtone or integration of Forces — " knots in the Ether," 

 as Maxwell and Thomson conceived the beginning — is still 

 going on around us to-day, but so very slowly that we have 

 as yet no means of estimating its increase, and therefore, as far 

 as our senses are capable of instructing us, the corollary to the 

 Law of the Conservation of Energy and Matter ; that matter 

 cannot be created still remains apparent. Yet in the physical 

 world we are acquainted with other Laws that support the 

 hypothesis that Forces are assorting themselves into hetero- 

 geneous complexities, manifested to our senses as new creations. 

 Newland's Law of Octaves, Mendeleeff's Periodic Law, and 

 Moseley's tables ^ have in themselves no direct connection with 

 rhythmical action such as we are considering in " periods " ; but 

 these Laws concern us, inasmuch as they represent, as it were, 

 an artificial tabulation of certain recurring properties among the 

 elements that point to their creation as the result of rhythmical 

 action ' — ^fitful analogies to Bode's Law. This particular rhythm 

 is beginning to be known now to us in our newer ideas of chemical 

 action.* 



Further, our knowledge of physical chemistry tells us, not 

 only of the probabilities of a new creation or assortment, but 

 of the certainty that rhj^thmical action is the basis of all Nature ; 

 as we have seen, radio-activity supports our ideas of new 

 rhythms or overtones developing from the interactions of the 

 main cycles, as does the fact that the stability of a chemical 

 substance is conditioned by the assortment of forces — an over- 

 tone within itself, dependent on the fundamental Cosmic rhythm ; 

 for example, gaseous carbon is rendered more stable by the 

 manifestation of certain forces and the latency of others within 

 itself, as it changes its physical state from the gaseous to the 

 solid crystalline form. 



Spectroscopic analyses give us a further insight into rhyth- 

 mical action. A fitful analogy to the rhythm of sound, where 

 a string of a piano will take up the same sound wave it would 

 'emit itself when vibrated, is shown by the fact that the vapour 

 of an element absorbs the same portion of the spectrum as it 

 would emit if incandescent. The relation between the absorp- 

 tion spectra and the emission spectra of the same element is 

 obviously due to the fact that in the former the assorted forces 

 in the element, together with the vibrating forces in artificial light, 



1 Cf. Introduction to Physical Chemistry, James Walker. 



2 Cf. The Radio-Elements and the Periodic Law, F. Soddy, F.R.S. 



3 Science Progress, January 1920, p, 376. 



