THE FINITE UNIVERSE 



going far, it may be observed that in following 

 this conception the distinguished German chemist 

 Emil Fischer has been able to fabricate forty dif- 

 ferent kinds of sugar where nature knows not one- 

 quarter so many. The triumphs of the atomic 

 theory have been so signal and so unbroken that 

 it may be regarded as the most practically fruitful 

 hypothesis now in the service of the investigators 

 of the properties of matter. All chemical syn- 

 theses, and all hopes for the laboratory manufact- 

 ure of food-stuffs, and of life, rest thereon. 



The millions of. different substances known upon 

 the earth and in the stars are all reducible to 

 seventy or eighty varieties of atoms. These are 

 the elements. The inquiring mind of man will not 

 stop here. Instinctively it will go on and reduce 

 all these elements to the varied combination of a 

 single primal substance. Within twenty years from 

 the time Lavoisier had laid the foundations of the 

 quantitative analysis of matter this suggestion had 

 been put forth by Prout. It has hung before the 

 minds of workers in this field like an ignis fatuus 

 for a century. At last there appears on the horizon 

 the possibility of its experimental demonstration. 



Studying deeply the puzzling phenomena of the 

 Crookes tube, the same which produces the X-rays, 

 Professor J. J. Thomson has reached some strik- 



93 



