206 THE CHEMISTRY OF THE SUN. [CHAP. 



them, alas ! no longer with us I refer to the late Sir Benjamin 

 Brodie and Professor Sterry Hunt. 



Sir B. Brodie in Part I. of his Calculus of Chemical Opera- 

 tions, read before the Eoyal Society on May 3, 1866, 1 was led 

 by his mathematical treatment of chemical phenomena to 

 assume the existence of certain ideal elements. These, he said, 

 " though now revealed to us through the numerical properties of 

 chemical equations only as implicit and dependent existences, we 

 cannot but surmise may sometimes become, or may in the past 

 have been, isolated and independent existences? 



The influence of this view on Professor Sterry Hunt had best 

 be given in his own words : 2 



" Shortly after this publication, in the spring of 1867, I spent 

 several days in Paris with the late Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, 

 repeating with him some of his remarkable experiments in chemical 

 dissociation, the theory of which we then discussed in its relations 

 to Faye's solar hypothesis. From Paris, in the month of May, I 

 went, as the guest of Brodie, for a few days to Oxford, where I 

 read for the first time and discussed with him his essay on the 

 Calculus of Chemical Operations in which connection occurred 

 the very natural suggestion that his ideal elements might perhaps 

 be liberated in solar fires, and thus be made evident to the spectro- 

 scope. I was then about to give, by invitation, a lecture before the 

 Royal Institution on " The Chemistry of the Primeval Earth, which 

 was delivered May 31, 1867. A stenographic report of the lecture, 

 revised by the author, was published in the Chemical News of June 

 21, 1867, and in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution. Therein 

 I considered the chemistry of nebulae, sun, and stars in the com- 

 bined light of spectroscopic analysis and Deville's researches on 

 dissociation, and concluded with the generalisation that the 

 ' breaking-up of compounds, or dissociation of elements, by 

 intense heat,' is a principle of universal application, so that we may 

 suppose that all the elements which make up the sun, or our planet, 

 would, when so intensely heated as to be in the gaseous condition 

 which all matter is capable of assuming, remain uncombined, that 

 is to say, would exist together in the state of chemical elements, 

 1 Phil. Trans. 1866. 2 Chem. News, 1882, vol. xlv. p. 74. 



