4 Introduction 



crystals, the plants and animals, man himself and his social insti- 

 tutionsall must be seen as the outcome of a long process of 

 Becoming. There are some eighty-odd chemical elements on the 

 earth to-day, and it is now much more than a suggestion that 

 these arc the outcome of an inorganic evolution, element giving 

 ( -lenient, going hack and back to some primeval stuff, 

 from which they were all originally derived, infinitely long ago. 

 No idea has been so powerful a tool in the fashioning of New 

 Knowledge as this simple but profound idea of Evolution, that 

 the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future, 

 d with the picture of a continuity of evolution from nebula 

 to social systems comes a promise of an increasing control a 

 promise that Man will become not only a more accurate student, 

 hut a more complete master of his world. 



It is characteristic of modern science that the whole world 

 is seen to be more vital than before. Everywhere there has been 

 a passage from the static to the dynamic. Thus the new revela- 

 tions of the constitution of matter, which we owe to the dis- 

 coveries of men like Professor Sir J. J. Thomson, Professor Sir 

 Ernest Rutherford, and Professor Frederick Soddy, have shown 

 the very dust to have a complexity and an activity heretofore 

 unimagined. Such phrases as "dead" matter and "inert" matter 

 have gone by the board. 



The new theory of the atom amounts almost to a new con- 

 ception of the universe. It bids fair to reveal to us many of 

 nature's hidden secrets. The atom is no longer the indivisible 

 particle of matter it was once understood to be. We know now 

 that there is an atom within the atom that what we thought 

 was elementary can be dissociated and broken up. The present- 

 day theories of the atom and the constitution of matter are the 

 outcome of the comparatively recent discovery of such things 

 as radium, the X-rays, and the wonderful revelations of such 

 instruments as the spectroscope and other highly perfected scien- 

 tific instruments. 



The advent of the electron theory has thrown a flood of 

 light on what before was hidden or only dimly guessed at. It 

 has given lisa new conception of the framework of the universe. 

 We are beginning to know and realise of what matter is made 



