2O4 STASIAN FOLLY AND FRAUD. 



take that work of Clarke of 1897, produced by our National 

 Government and its Scientific Institutions, which are the most 

 costly on earth, containing the most despotic and fanatic 

 scientific (.<*) men on the globe, and study it again and again, 

 and then study it more carefully still. 



He would then find that his declaration (Zeitschrift, Bd. 

 23, p. 187; 1897) was too hasty namely, that the estimation 

 of value or weight of determinations used by Clarke, is 

 nonsense (hat keinen Sinn) ; is simply Furor ClarkiL 



When, upon such more careful reading of the work of 

 Clarke, our gentle friend Ostwald, verifies my recognition 

 here given of the annihilation of our common foolish 

 notion of the constancy of weight, Professor Ostwald will 

 beg Clarke's pardon and acknowledge meekly his stupidity 

 and error, as I have done above. 



And then, Professor Ostwald and myself, will as two 

 penitent brothers, join hands, and feel happy that the Great 

 American Nation maintains at the cost of many millions of 

 dollars a year, stupendous scientific Institutions, Bureaus 

 and What-Nots, in which the most eminent scientists have 

 been living on atomic "weights, until, at last, these atomic 

 weights have given out. 



Lavoisier is pointed out by Kopp (in his Geschichte der 

 Chemie, II, p. 73) as the chemist who first made a formal 

 statement of the indestructibility of matter or to speak 

 more scientifically, die Eihaltung des Stojfes. The old 

 Greeks had a notion of that sort, but that does not count 

 before exact chemists. 



This, retained by chemists till the present, implies that 

 the weight of a compound is equal to the sum of weights of 

 its constituents. Berzelius never doubted this axiom, but 

 based all his work upon it. 



This pretended axiom has been demonstrated to be false 

 by Clarke in his famous Constants of Nature, edition 1897, 

 on pages 70, 108, 324, 334 formally, and throughout the 

 entire book in all its final results. 



With this grand discovery of the Chief Chemist Clarke, 

 chemistry of precision suddenly terminates in a sort of 

 RAGNAROK that must involve the Constants of Nature and 



