1887,] Mr. W. Croolces on Genesis of the Elements. 37 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, February 18, 1887. 



Sir Frederick Abel, C.B. D.C.L. F.E.S. Manager and 

 Vice-President, in the Chair, 



William Crookes, Esq. F.R.S. V.P.C.S. M.BJ. 

 Genesis of the Elements, 

 In the very words selected to denote the subject I have the honour of 

 bringing before you, I have raised a question which may be regarded 

 as heretical. At the time when our modern conception of chemistry 

 first dawned upon the scientific mind, the average chemist as a matter 

 of course accepted the elements as ultimate facts. He regarded his 

 elements as absolutely simple, incapable of transmutation or decom- 

 position, each a kind of barrier behind which we could not penetrate. 

 If closely pressed he said that they were self-existent from all 

 eternity, or that they had been individually created just as we^ now 

 find them at the present day. Or he might argue that the origin of 

 the elements did not in the lea'st concern us, and was, indeed, a 

 question lying outside the boundaries of science. 



But in these our times of restless inquiry we cannot help asking 

 what are these elements, whence do they come, what is their signifi- 

 cation ? We cannot but feel that unless some approach to an answer 

 to these questions can be found, our chemistry, after all. is something 

 profoundly unsatisfactory. These elements perplex us in our 

 researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very 

 dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us — -mocking, 

 mystifying, and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities. 



If I venture to say that our commonly received elements are not 

 simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance or have 

 not been created in a desultory and mechanical manner but have been 

 evolved from simpler matters— or perhaps indeed from one sole kind 

 of matter— I do but give formal utterance to an idea which has been, 

 so to speak, for some time "in the air " of science. Chemists, 

 physicists, philosophers of the highest merit declare explicitly their 

 belief that the seventy (or thereabouts) elements of our text-books are 

 not the pillars of Hercules which we must never hope to pass. 



Did time allow I might quote utterances of Dalton, of Professor 

 Faraday, of Dr. Gladstone, of the late Sir Benjamin Brodie, of 

 Professor Graham, of Dr. Mills, of Professor Stokes, of Mr. Norman 

 Lockyer, all pointing in the same direction and all showing that in 

 the course of their researches these servants of Science have been led 

 to think that these same elements are not the final outcome— the be- 

 all and the end-all of chemistry. 



