140 THE NEW KNOWLEDGE. 



that chemists were always careful to guard their definition 

 by the statement that the elements were undecomposable 

 so far as they could do; and simple so far as they could see, 

 but the underlying assumption of two hundred years of 

 chemists was that the elements were simple, unchanging 

 bodies. Gold was gold and iron was iron, and any attempt 

 . to make them other than themselves was the proper func- 

 tion of the men of a thousand years hence. Of course, there 

 were men who divined rather than reasoned that this sim- 

 plicity and unchangingness were apparent rather than real. 

 Thus, in 1811 we find Davy saying " It is the duty of the 

 chemist to be bold in pursuit. . . . He must recollect how 

 contrary knowledge sometimes is to what appears to be ex- 

 perience. ... To inquire whether the metals be capable 

 of being decomposed and composed is a grand object of 

 true philosophy." Again, in 1815, Faraday uses similar 

 terms when he says : "To decompose the metals, to reform 

 them, and to realize the once absurd notion of transmuta- 

 tion, are the problems now given to the chemist for solu- 

 tion." But these were voices crying in the wilderness and 

 the possibility of the transmutation of one element into an- 

 other was, on the part of everybody, deemed as absurd as 

 the existence of the philosopher's stone which, to the al- 

 chemists, was to accomplish the work. 



We have now to present to the reader some remarkable 

 facts: Let us leave, for the nonce, all talk of atoms, ions 

 and corpuscles, and the mysterious rays of radium, to con- 

 sider in a simple way some straightforward matters of fact 

 connected with radio-activity. We are dependent for these 

 " facts " on the men who enunciate them; but if these men 

 are men of light and leading, if they command the respect 

 of all their confreres, and if they occupy positions of the 

 highest honour and responsibility in the world of science we 



