THE ATOMIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



403 



Stas, who began with a belief in the hypothesis, led to the 

 result "that the simplicity supposed by Front's hypothesis 

 to exist in the ratios of weights which come into play in 

 chemical processes has experimentally not been found ; it 

 does not exist in reality." * 



science, waiting to take a further 

 and more definite development. It 

 is important to keep before men's 

 minds the idea of the genesis of the 

 elements ; this gives some form to 

 our conceptions, and accustoms the 

 mind to look for some physical pro- 

 duction of atoms." Further on he 

 coins the word " protyle " (from 

 irpc&rrj and SA.TJ) to denote the original 

 kind of matter, and thus reminds us 

 that, though speculations of this 

 nature are not infrequent in English 

 philosophy since Roger Bacon, the 

 English language has no word to 

 denote what the Germans call 

 " Urstoff," the Romans "prima 

 materia," the Greeks rb oToixtioi' or 

 simply v\rj. The line of thought 

 which again and again leads philo- 

 sophers to speculate on this " prima 

 materia " and upon a hypothesis 

 similar to that of Prout is interest- 

 ing and noteworthy, though it must 

 be acknowledged that, so far, no 

 real scientific benefit has been de- 

 rived from it, and that it rather 

 tends to upset the only firm founda- 

 tion of modern chemistry, the fixity 

 of the equivalent proportions as we 

 now use and know them. Mende- 

 leeff himself, in his excellent Fara- 

 day lecture on the periodic law 

 ('Journal of the Chemical Society,' 

 1889, p. 634, &c.) distinctly refuses 

 to recognise any connection between 

 the periodic law and the idea of an 

 unique matter. 



1 Stas, quoted by Ostwald, 

 ' Lehrbuch der Allgemeinen Chemie,' 

 vol. i. 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1891, p. 129. 

 The revival of the hypothesis of 

 Prout about the middle of the cen- 

 tury was owing to the discovery by 

 Dumas and Stas of the fact that 

 Berzelius's figure, 12 '20, for the 



of the elementary atoms, in the 

 structure rather than in the material 

 difference of the elements them- 

 selves. The development of this 

 view in the modern chemistry of 

 "types" and "structures" will 

 always go hand in hand with an 

 avowed or tacit belief in the exist- 

 ence of an ultimate uniformity of 

 substance, out of which by a diver- 

 sity of configuration of atoms the 

 infinite variety of compounds is 

 produced. The accurate measure- 

 ments of Stas had again about the 

 year 1860 disproved the hypothesis 

 of Prout. It has, however, again 

 turned up in recent scientific litera- 

 ture. The theories of evolution, 

 physical and philosophical, the dis- 

 coveries of the spectroscope regard- 

 ing the small number of elements 

 contained in the photosphere of the 

 sun, the periodic laws of Lothar 

 Meyer and Mendele"eff and the 

 stereometric theory of the carbon- 

 compounds, of which I shall speak 

 later on, all point to the con- 

 clusion that our so-called elements 

 are composite bodies, and favour a 

 view, similar to that of Prout, that 

 possibly a single kind of matter 

 may form the only substance of 

 which atoms, molecules, elements, 

 and compounds are made up. Pro- 

 fessor Crookes in his address to the 

 chemical section of the British 

 Association in 1886 revived inter- 

 est in the subject. After quot- 

 ing a variety of authorities, he 

 sums up: "From these passages, 

 which might easily be multiplied, 

 it plainly appears that the notion 

 not necessarily of the decomposi- 

 bility, but at any rate of the com- 

 plexibility of our supposed elements 

 is, so to speak, in the air of 



