Electricity 



upon which may be reared, not a new piece of 

 mechanism, but a new science or a new art. 



In the recent swift subjugation of the territory 

 open alike to the chemist and the electrician, 

 where each advances the quicker for the other's 

 company, we have fresh confirmation of an old 

 truth that the boundary lines which mark off 

 one field of science from another are purely artifi- 

 cial, are set up only for temporary convenience. 

 The chemist has only to dig deep enough to find 

 that the physicist and himself occupy common 

 ground. "Delve from the surface of your sphere 

 to its heart, and at once your radius joins every 

 other. " Even the briefest glance at electro- 

 chemistry should pause to acknowledge its pro- 

 found debt to the new theories as to the bonding 

 of atoms to form molecules, and of the continuity 

 between solution and electrical dissociation. 

 However much these hypotheses may be modi- 

 fied as more light is shed on the geometry and 

 the journeyings of the molecule, they have for the 

 time being recommended themselves as finder- 

 thoughts of golden value. These speculations of 

 the chemist carry him back perforce to the days 

 of his childhood. As he then joined together 

 his black and white bricks I } 6 found that he could 

 build cubes of widely different patterns. It was 

 in propounding a theory of molecular architec- 

 ture that Kekul6 gave an impetus to a vast and 

 growing branch of chemical industry that of 

 the synthetic production of dy( s and allied com- 

 pounds. 



137 



