1908] on Davy's Discovery of the Metals of the AlJcalis. 13 



handled with circumspection and care. Even as late as 1890 its 

 selling price was as high, as 8s. per lb. To-day it is 8^. Sodium now 

 takes rank, therefore, witli zinc, tin, copper, or aluminium as a 

 common, ordinary metal of conmierce. 



I am indebted to the directors of the Castner-Kellner Company, 

 and in particular to my friends Sir Henry Roscoe and Mr. Beilby, for 

 affording me the opportunity, in connection with this lecture, of 

 actually witnessing the modern process of manufacturing sodium as 

 it is carried out at ^Yallsend ; and I am further indebted to Mr. Beilby 

 for the loan of the lantern slides and specimens with which I have 

 sought to illustrate that process. 



And in concluding may I be permitted to recall here the feelings 

 to which that visit to Wallsend gave rise. There, grouped together 

 on the very spot where ended the old wall— the visible symbol of the 

 power and might of a civilisation long since passed away — were some 

 of the characteristic signs of another civilisation ampler and more 

 beneficent. Before me, stretching down to the river, was the 

 factory where a score of workers, clad in helmets and gauntlets and 

 swathed like so many Knights Templar, travel-stained and war-worn, 

 their visages lit up by the yellow soda flames, and their ears half- 

 deafened with the sound of exploding hydrogen — a veritable inferno 

 — were repeating on a Gargantuan scale the little experiment first 

 made a century ago in the cellars of this building ; turning out, day 

 and night, hundredweights of the plastic metal in place of the little 

 pin-heads which then burst upon the astonished and delighted gaze 

 of Davy. Behind me was the magnificent power-house — one of the 

 most magnificent of its kind in the world —furnishing not only the 

 electrical energy which transformed the soda into sodium, but diffusing 

 this energy for a multitude of other purposes over an entire district — 

 a noble temple to the genius and prescience of Faraday. Surely one 

 might here say, if you desire to see the monuments of these men, look 

 around ! And to my right, and close at hand, was the huge building 

 slip just vacated by the Mauretania, herself a symbol of the supremacy 

 of an empire, far mightier, more world-wide, and more potent for 

 good than that which massed its legions behind the old wall. 



[T. E. T.] 



