ELISHA MlTCHELIy SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY. 40 



eye and carry in itself in ^reat measure its own explana- 

 tion. It should present the details of the law and not 

 some portion of them merel}^ It should not lead to con- 

 fusion of thoug*ht, nor to erroneous conclusions, nor to un- 

 confirmed dreams and fancies. It is manifest that in the 

 present imperfect state of the system no such diagram is 

 possible. Of all which have been offered I do not know 

 of a sing-le one which is truly helpful, which has not upon 

 it some serious blemish, and so I would give voice to 

 a warning- against their use. Some one of the tabula- 

 tions must serve our purposes for the present as a means 

 of graphic representation. 



While it is true that the Periodic System has not told 

 us how these simple bodies which we call elements were 

 generated nor from what they came, while it leaves for 

 the present the so-called Genesis of the Elements a blank 

 and may never contribute anything to raise the vail, it is 

 still true that the System has done much to strengthen 

 the belief in the Unity of Matter and to prove beyond all 

 doubt that these elements are not independent, discon- 

 nected units but strangely related and interwoven parts 

 of one symmetric whole. However powerless we may be 

 to decompose these simple bodies and split them up into 

 components, it is becoming every day clearer that they 

 are not truly simple but compound. Of what composed or 

 how, we know not, but through them all there runs the 

 traces of some community of nature. Chemists, in their 

 conservatism, are slow to acknowledge a change in belief, so 

 radical as this, w^ithout strong bases of proof, either di- 

 rectly or indirectly experimental. It smacks strongly of 

 "the baseless fancies of the early alchemists and the Science 

 cannot afford any more Will-o-the-Wisp chases. But when 

 such great names as those of Wislicenus, Thomsen and 

 our own Remsen lend their weight and influence to the 

 new movement we can follow, using the same caution as 

 our leaders. To quote Remsen "It has been shown by a 

 .Russian chemist, Mendeleeff and at the same time by a 



