ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



361 



to do what Professor Haeckel has done in the more re- 

 stricted field of the history of the living creation. Whilst 

 these attempts are by many scientific authorities con- 



tories. His speculations, based 

 upon his own observations as well 

 as those of many other European 

 and American authorities, such as 

 Secchi, Dumas, Kayser and Runge, 

 Rutherford, Rowland, Young, and, 

 above all, of Sir W. Crookes and 

 the late Professor Preston, all of 

 which, as well as many others, he 

 generously quotes, were given in 

 three works ' The Chemistry of the 

 Sun ' (1887), ' The Meteoritic Hy- 

 pothesis ' (1890), and 'The Sun's 

 Place in Nature ' (1897). He has 

 latterly collected the whole evidence 

 in a brilliant and fascinating volume 

 entitled ' Inorganic Evolution as 

 studied by Spectrum Analysis ' 

 (1900). The central idea contained 

 in these books, and elaborated with 

 increasing detail and clearness, was 

 suggested as early as 1873, when 

 Sir N. Lockyer pointed out "that 

 many of the difficulties would 

 vanish if it were conceded that 

 the ' atoms ' of the chemist were 

 broken up or dissociated into finer 

 forms by the high temperatures 

 employed in the new method of 

 investigation" ('Inorg. Evol.,' p. 

 73). This " dissociation " hypothe- 

 sis has been much criticised, and 

 can only be firmly established by 

 patient and prolonged research in 

 that borderland which unites 

 chemistry and astronomy. As the 

 author says : " The chemist has 

 little interest in an appeal to 

 celestial phenomena, and astrono- 

 mers do not generally concern 

 themselves with chemistry. The 

 region investigated by the chemist 

 is a low temperature region, 

 dominated by monatomic and poly- 

 atomic molecules. The region I 

 have chiefly investigated is a high 

 temperature region, in which mer- 



cury gives us the same phenomena 

 as manganese. In short, the 

 changes with which spectrum analy- 

 sis has to do take place at a far 

 higher temperature level than that 

 employed in ordinary chemical 

 work." It is well to note that 

 during and since the time when 

 the dissociation hypothesis was first 

 prominently put forward researches 

 conducted on entirely different 

 lines have led to similar views 

 i.e., to a further elaboration of 

 the atomic hypothesis. M. Berthe- 

 lot wrote in 1880 : " L'^tude ap- 

 profondie des proprie'te's physiques 

 et chimiques des masses ele'men- 

 taires, qui constituent nos corps 

 simples actuels, tend chaque jour 

 d'avantage a les assimiler, non a 

 des atomes indivisibles, homogenes 

 et susceptibles d'eprouver seule- 

 ment des mouvements d'ensemble 

 . . . il est difficile d'imaginer un 

 mot et une notion plus contraires 

 a 1'observation ; mais a des edifices 

 fort complexes, dou& d'une archi- 

 tecture specifique et animes de 

 mouvements intestins tres varies " 

 (quoted in 'Inorg. Evol.,' p. 28). 

 The first chemical confirmation of 

 the dissociation hypothesis came 

 in 1883 through the " beautiful 

 researches on the rare earth Yttria," 

 contained in Sir Wm. Crookes's 

 Bakerian Lecture to the Royal 

 Society. " In the lectures he gave 

 a sketch of the train of reasoning 

 by which he had been led to the 

 opinion that . . . this stable mole- 

 cular group had been (by a process 

 termed 'fractionation ') split up into 

 its constituents " (ibid., p. 116) ; and 

 already, in 1879, Sir Wm. Crookes 

 had provisionally accepted the 

 "dissociation" hypothesis (p. 74). 

 Anomalies also in the periodic 



