ATOMS AND MOLECULES 15 



distracted arranging them in a new home. If there 

 were few things of two or three kinds, the task would be 

 easy. Thirty thousand volumes would tax for no short 

 period a born librarian to arrange in the best order. It 

 has taken weeks, and sometimes months, of painstaking 

 care and experimental testing to determine single numbers, 

 a 12, a 14, a 16, representing atomic weights. Investi- 

 gators, caring only for truth, have counted no amount of 

 careful research and persistent labour too great to win 

 the prize of a single definite and accurate result. But in 

 such cases the order existed, and needed only to be 

 brought into view. To bring the order into existence, 

 hoc opus, hie labor, this is the work, this is the labour. 

 To make the goods, to produce the volumes, needed 

 thought and labour greater far than to arrange them. 

 And surely to deal with every particle of matter in the 

 universe, so as to make it of a special type, to order all, 

 so that they might come under types so few and compact, 

 demanded an amount of thought and work of overwhelm- 

 ing greatness, and could not be the result of chance. 



It is not a small thing also that the number should be 

 so suitable for the finite minds of earth, enabling them to 

 build up a science of them. To bring all matter under 

 command so perfect, into a state of fitness for work so 

 magnificent, into a condition so suitable for spreading out 

 before the intelligences which have appeared in the 

 world most interesting fields of knowledge, was assuredly 

 of a mind which knew the end from the beginning. 



This point is strengthened in that the elements are still 

 further divisible into classes : into two, as metals and non- 

 metals ; into three, as gases, liquids, and solids. The 

 power of classifying and naming belongs to mind only. 

 Much more does the power of producing the possibilities 

 of classification belong to it. By far the larger number 



