CLARKE'S DISCOVERY. 203 



This is a very sad termination for especially two 

 reasons. 



First, it will be apparently impossible for the u high 

 authority/' Clarke, to continue " to live upon this subject 

 of atomic weights " any longer at our National Capital; see 

 letter, p. 25, of my " False Atomic Weights of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution." 



Second, the school of Stas has always proclaimed that 

 it was Stas who demonstrated, by his experiments, the 

 unchangeability of the weight of matter. 



This we see in the great Stasian Apostle Ostivald^ under 

 the name of " die Erhaltitng des Stoffes" pp. 4-5 of his 

 Physikalische Chemie, II edition, Leipzig, 1891. On page 

 14 of the same work, Ostwald ascends to the declaration 

 that Stas -worked to the ten-millionth exactly, and asserts that 

 in no branch of science such -wonderful accuracy or exactness 

 has been obtained as in these determinations of Stas. 



U O come, let us worship and fall down" before this 

 Greatest Master of Modern Science. (Venite, exultemus 

 Domino.) 



And now, all this glory of Stas, proclaimed from Leipzig 

 University, falls to the ground by the one modest little line 

 in our own Clarke's Variable Constants, not of Nature that 

 Potassium Chloride weighs appreciably, yea very consider- 

 ably, more than the sum of the weights of its constituent 

 elements. 



How sad my kind and good friend Ostwald will be when 

 he learns of this terrible ending of all fixed, definite pro- 

 portions in chemistry, of all attempts at determination of 

 atomic weights, and that all the glorious precision of even 

 his own Great Master Stas, was nothing but a mere shadowy 

 imagination. " Vanity of Vanities." 



It is true, Ostwald has close at hand this great work of 

 Clarke on the " Constants of Nature." 



Ostwald has indeed "reviewed" this work of Clarke 

 but he has not done the work justice, has not studied it 

 properly, for he does not mention this, the most striking 

 and astonishing discovery of Clarke. 



Herr Geheimrath Wilhelm Ostwald, of Leipzig, should 



