[ 217 ] 



Hnotbcr Conetitucnt of tbe Htmoepberc* 



IN announcing the recognition of Argon, not quite two months 

 ago, as a constituent of the atmosphere, we said : " The new 

 element will be a fresh instrument of research." The predic- 

 tion has already been realised. At the annual meeting of the 

 Chemical Society, held Wednesday, March 27, the Faraday medal 

 was presented to Lord Rayleigh for his discovery of Argon, and 

 no sooner was this done and the presentation suitably acknow- 

 ledged, than Professor Ramsay, the fellow-worker with Lord Ray- 

 leigh in that discovery, surprised the chemists present with the 

 announcement that he had found another new element associated 

 with Argon, and he proceeded briefly to explain the nature of his 

 remarkable find, which has in it features as romantic as the detec- 

 tion of Argon itself, and must have highly important consequences 

 to the future of chemical and physical enquiry. 



We say romantic advisedly. It is surely a wonder-awakening 

 circumstance when the first evidence of something we possess on 

 earth comes to us from the sun, and then that the chemist should 

 find this substance in a very rare earth, and at length, by the use 

 of the most refined methods of science, arrive at the fact that this 

 material is probably one of those that make up the very air we 

 breathe. Such was, in short, the meaning of Professor Ramsay's 

 communication to the Chemical Society. A ray of light comes 

 from the sun and is passed through a small prism of glass — the 

 spectroscope. In the image of that ray, broken into its several 

 colours, there are certain lines which show the existence in the sun 

 of iron, of sodium, of hydrogen, and various other elements, most 

 of which exist on this planet and behave in the same way towards 

 light. But there are some lines that seem to betoken the presence 

 in the sun of a substance we know nothing of. Nature is constant. 

 The lines are always there, and the physicist does not hesitate to 

 give a name to the hypothetical element — of which there was not 

 a vestige of evidence to be had elsewhere. On the faith of rays 

 of light, decomposed by a suitably mounted glass prism, he 



* From Daily Telegraph, March 28, 1895. 



International Journal of Microscopy and Natural Science. 



Third Series. Vol. V. o 



