136 



CHEMISTRY. 



ished, and a British protectorate established 

 over the entire coast. Eastern Zululand was 

 reserved for the Zulus, with a British protect- 

 orate, if they desired. A part of Central Zulu- 

 land is included in the district assigned to the 

 Zulus, who also retain Ulundi; but the most 

 valuable portions go to the Boers, whose 

 boundary extends to within 40 miles of the 

 sea. The roads are free, and missionaries will 

 be at liberty to go everywhere. In return for 

 their claims near the sea-shore, the Boers re- 

 ceived the valuable district of Ungojana, to the 

 north of their republic, in which there were 

 few natives, and another rich district, already 

 fully occupied by the Boers, on the southeast. 

 The people of Natal objected to the settlement, 

 and the Legislative Council of the colony, in 

 order to bring pressure on the Governor, voted 

 against financial and other Government pro- 

 posals, and even reduced the Governor's salary. 

 They desired the annexation to Natal of the 

 Reserve and Eastern Zululand, if not of the 

 new republic, and insisted on a free-trade route 

 through Zululand. 



CHEMISTRY. Chemical Philosophy. The most 

 valuable contribution to the subject of chem- 

 ical philosophy during the year was Prof. Will- 

 iam Crookes's inaugural address as President of 

 of the Chemical Section of the British Associa- 

 tion on the nature and possible origin of the 

 chemical elements. Of the attempts, he said, 

 hitherto made to define or explain an element, 

 none satisfy the mind. Such definitions as 

 those given in the text-books, that an element 

 is a body which has not been decomposed, or 

 a something to which we can add, but from 

 which we can take nothing away, are doubly 

 unsatisfactory. They are provisional, and may 

 cease to-morrow to be applicable to any given 

 case. They are based not on any attribute of 

 the thing to be defined, but on the limitations 

 of human power. The idea that the elements 

 are capable of further decomposition is not 

 new in chemistry, but has been broached by 

 Faraday, Herbert Spencer, and others. Mr. 

 Lockyer has shown that in the heavenly bod- 

 ies of the highest temperature, a number of 

 our reputed elements are dissociated, or have 

 never been formed. Prof. Stokes suggests that 

 a certain line in the spectrum of the nebulae 

 may indicate some form of matter more element- 

 ary than any we know. It is important to keep 

 in mind the idea of the genesis of the elements ; 

 and still more important to keep in view the 

 probability that there exist in Nature labora- 

 tories where atoms are formed, and laboratories 

 where atoms cease to be. Are the distinctive 

 properties of our elements accidental or deter- 

 minate? Why might there not as well have 

 been 7 or 700, or 7,000 absolutely distinct ele- 

 ments as the 70 (in round numbers) which we 

 recognize ? If the peculiarities of the elements 

 were accidental, they could hardly display 

 the mutual relations which are brought out 

 in the periodical classification. May they not 

 have been evolved from some few antecedent 



forms of matter, or possibly from one such, 

 as it is now held that the variations of ani- 

 mals and plants have been developed from 

 fewer and earlier forms of organic life? It 

 must be admitted that we have no direct evi- 

 dence of the transmutation of any supposed 

 element into another, or of its resolution into 

 anything simpler. But there is indirect evi- 

 dence bearing on the point. Herschel and Clerk- 

 Maxwell have concluded that atoms bear the 

 impress of manufactured articles. Prout's hy- 

 pothesis that the atomic weights of the other 

 elements are multiples of that of hydrogen, has 

 not been borne out by the more accurate de- 

 terminations of them, but coincidences which 

 should not be disregarded are presented in 

 those determinations. The discrepancies may 

 possibly be reconciled if we supposed the unit 

 of atomic weight to be possessed not by hy- 

 drogen, but by some body as yet not found, 

 whose atomic weight is less than that of hydro- 

 gen. Such a body may be the hypothetical 

 element helium, whose lines are revealed in 

 the spectrum of the sun. 



Other evidence on this point is furnished by 

 certain peculiarities in the occurrence of the 

 elements in the earth's crust. Many of them 

 are found in groups of associated members hav- 

 ing peculiarities that indicate common affini- 

 ties ; as in the case of nickel and cobalt, the 

 two groups of platinum metals ; and the so- 

 called " rare earths " which occur in gadolin- 

 ite, samarskite, etc. Some of the peculiar 

 features of the rare earths, yttria, samaria. 

 holmia, erbia, etc., seem to point to their for- 

 mation generally from some common material 

 placed in each case in conditions nearly iden- 

 tical. The compound radicals, with their anal- 

 ogy with accepted elements, also throw light 

 on this view. 



Dr. E. J. Mills has suggested that our present 

 elements are the results of successive polymeri- 

 zations which have taken place in the process 

 of the cooling of matter from its pristine in- 

 tensely heated condition. Measuring the natu- 

 ral increase in density of chemical substances 

 in cooling as a function of time or of temper- 

 ature, we may sometimes observe that there 

 are critical points corresponding to the forma- 

 tion of new and well-defined substances, as 

 when phosphorus is converted into the red 

 variety. "We might then account for the forma- 

 tion of the elements, by conceiving the original 

 existence of matter in an ultra-gaseous state 

 that may be called protyle, at a temperature 

 inconceivably, hotter than any now known, 

 and even above the dissociation-point of atoms. 

 In course of time the temperature of protyle 

 is reduced to a point at which granulation 

 takes place; matter, as we know it comes into 

 existence, and atoms are formed with their 

 potentialities of energy, including that of atomic 

 weight. Acting on the neighboring protyle, 

 they accelerate the formation of other atoms. 

 We need not suppose that all the elements 

 were simultaneously created; but that the 



