468 



NATURE 



[December 9, 1920 



ncH'ds — so individualised and so hopelessly jealous 

 amon^ ourselves that we will not co-operate and 

 orf^anise our forces. Nothing could show this more 

 ckarly than the way in which the Royal Society has 

 .sacrificed its opportunities duriny the war period by 

 failing to bring all its fellows together and thus make 

 our corporate influence felt. Little wonder that science 

 is being more and more excluded. We are talking of 

 government by public opinion but real opinion can- 

 not be made public. The columns of the Press are 

 not open to any serious discussion from our side ; 

 the books we write are not understood even by our- 

 selves. Owing to excessive specialisation we are 

 becoming less and less able to express and protect 

 ourselves, less interested in stating our case in any 

 broad way ; what is worse, too selfishly immersed 

 each in his own narrow occupation to consider the 

 general interest : an we be not careful the position 

 won for us by the protagonists of the past will soon 

 be lost to us. 



Oiir failure is as window-dressers ; we have not 

 displayed our goods in the right manner. When a 

 business is a failure, the only way to re-establish it 

 is to reconstruct the management. That we have yet 

 to learn this elementary truth is clear, however, from 

 the recent appointment to the treasurership. A young 

 man should have been found for the office, gifted not 

 only with scientific experience but also with some 

 breadth of outlook, some understanding of men and 

 affairs ; instead, a senior member of the Association 

 has been chosen. 



If a senior were desirable, no better choice could 

 have been made; but I believe my old friend Principal 

 Griffiths will not mind my saying that he is saved 

 from inclusion in my class of elderly amiables only 

 bv the fact that throughout the war he was 

 conspicuously active in his efforts to bring the value 

 of scientific method before the public ; he is far too 

 soft-hearted to face the exigencies of the present 

 situation. 



The council must cease to be all but entirely an 

 old or even an elderly man's show; responsibility 

 must be forced upon the younger generation of active 

 workers. 



The secretaries obviously have no policy ; new men 

 must be chosen at the earliest possible date — I trust 

 on the three years' hire system advocated in my 

 former letter, so that the different subjects may be 

 cared for at shorter intervals. 



The real question at issue is : " How are we to 

 get at the public? " To do this we must look beyond 

 the meetings and in some way arrange for the pre- 

 paration and issue each year of a few authoritative 

 tracts dealing with bedrock problems in language that 

 can be understood by all. Subjects can easily be 

 found ; under E alone enough are to hand — Economics, 

 Education, Energy, Entomology, Eugenics, jEi'o/ii- 

 tion. Nobody believes in these, few know what the 

 terms comprise, yet the future of our race depends 

 on an intimate understanding and application of the 

 doctrines they cover. A great work would be done 

 by the Association- if only, by real discussion not the 

 dreamy, introspective twaddle of Section L, the non- 

 sense now spoken of as education were reduced to 

 terms of wisdom. Henry E. .'\rmstrong. 



The Constitution of the Elements. 



Since my last letter under the above title in Nature 

 of Julv 1, experiments have been made with a few- 

 more elements. The work has been progressivelv 

 more and more difficult, for it has not been easy to 

 find volatile compounds suitable for use, and when 



NO. 2667, VOL. 106] 



found the very objectionable chemical prof)erties of 

 some of them have led to experimental trouble and 

 disappointing results. Thus selenium, tin, antimonv, 

 and tellurium have so far yielded no result of an\ 

 value. 



Fortunately, iodine (atomic weight 126-92) gave 

 definite and unmistakable effects. It proves to be a 

 simple element of mass 127 — a result satisfactorily 

 confirmed by a single line at 142 corresponding to 

 CH3I, the vapour used in the experiments. This r»rtult 

 has particular interest in view of the recent work of 

 Kohlweiler {Zeit. Phys. Cheni., vol. xcv., 1920, p. 95), 

 who deduces five isotopes of iodine, all of even 

 integral atomic weights, and claims to have effected 

 a considerable separation of these by diffusion. 



Owing to the kindness of Prof. Collie and Dr. 

 Masson in p)roviding me with a sample of gas rich in 

 .xenon, I have been able to identify two more probable 

 isotopes of that element and obtain trustworthy 

 values for the atomic weights of the five already 

 found. The provisional figures given for these turn 

 out to be too low. The values quoted below were 

 obtained from the position of the second-order line 

 64-5. They should be trustworthy to about one-fifth 

 of a unit. 



.Additional evidence on argon leads to the conclusion 

 that its isotope 36 need no longer be regarded as 

 doubtful. 



The following table gives the results to date : 



Table of Elements and Isotopes. 



Minimum 

 Ele- Atomic Atomic number of Masies of isotopes in ordc 



ment number weight isotopes of their intensity 



H I 1008 I 1-ooS 



He 2 3-99 : 4 



B 5 10-90 2 1 1, 10 



C 6 12-00 I 12 



N 7 1401 1 14 



O 8 16-00 1 16 



F 9 19-00 1 ly 



Ne 10 20-20 2 20, 22, (21) 



Si 14 28-30 2 28, 29, (30) 



X 54 130-32 5.(7) 129, 132, 131. i.;4, 



136, (12S, 130:-) 

 Hg 80 20060 (6) (197-200), 202, 204 



(Numbers in brackets are provisional onlv.) 



F. W. Aston. 

 Cavendish I^aboratory, November 30. 



Solar Variation and the Weather. 



In Nature of July 29 last (p. 678) appears an 

 article by Dr. C. G. .Abbot on solar variation and the 

 weather, in which reference is made to the use of 

 solar data by the Argentine Weather Service. Drs. 

 Nansen and Helland-Hansen have also found some 

 interesting correlations between the variations of solar 

 radiation as measured by Dr. Abbot and variations of 

 temperature and pressure in Norway. 



As other investigators will no doubt be tempted 

 into this field, I feel that it may be of interest to give 

 briefly a summary of our latest results and con- 

 clusions. These conclusions are based on the studv 

 of an immense amount of data from various parts of 



