TRANSMUTATION ANCIENT AND MODERN 107 



Unfortunately it is not yet possible to supple- 

 ment these simple recipes for the artificial produc- 

 tion of gold with the necessary instructions as to 

 how an atom is to be caused to expel an a- or a 

 ^-particle at will, unless Nature has decreed that 

 it should do so of itself, in which case nothing known 

 will prevent it. But, if man ever achieves this 

 further control over Nature, it is quite certain that 

 the last thing he would want to do would be to 

 turn lead or mercury into gold for the sake of gold. 

 The energy that would be liberated, if the control 

 of these sub-atomic processes were as possible as 

 is the control of ordinary chemical changes, such 

 as combustion, would far exceed in importance and 

 value the gold. Rather it would pay to transmute 

 gold into silver or some base metal. 



War, unless in the meantime man had found a 

 better use for the gifts of science, would not be the 

 lingering agony it is to-day. Any selected section of 

 the world, or the whole of it if necessary, could be 

 depopulated with a swiftness and dispatch that would 

 leave nothing to be desired. 



Indeed in the whole tragic history of the past few 

 years nothing has been perhaps more illuminating 

 than the attitude of the world and its rulers to 

 science. The intellectual aspect of the discoveries 

 here briefly enumerated the discovery of radio- 

 activity, the realisation that it was due to a natural 

 transmutation of the elements, the laborious tracing 

 out, step by step, of the complicated sequence of 

 changes, the discovery of the law connecting these 

 changes with the Periodic Table, the first real 

 understanding as to what constitutes the difference 

 between one element and another, the vista that 

 opens out should man ever exercise over these higher 

 order of natural energy the control he has so 

 effectively assumed over the lower interesting 



