2 1 2 Literary and Philosophical Society. 



time, is the vortex atom, admired by Sir William Thomson, 

 and made by the movements of a fluid itself non-atomic. 

 This idea is of value so far that it gives us a mode of 

 imagining in what way a great diversity of bodies simple 

 to us may be made out of one truly simple materia prima, 

 and in what way an infinite variety of combinations may 

 take place, causing great diversity of character to appear 

 in compounds. It does not by any means destroy the 

 Daltonian mode of combination, neither does it settle the 

 original difficulty of the ultimate constitution of matter. 

 It shows in what way the Daltonian atom may serve the 

 purposes of creation in the stage in which our chemistry 

 acts, and removes the difficulties as to infinite divisibility, 

 one stage behind the present elements, putting it beside 

 all the other difficulties which are abundantly gathered 

 round every attempt to comprehend the infinite. 



We may leave without mention many centuries of 

 imperfect thought, although of most interesting wanderings 

 of the mind, names from Lucretius to Stephen Franz 

 Geoffroi, born 1672. We do this that we may leap at 

 once to the first ideas that promised a progress in the 

 direction of exact quantity in combination, and of course to 

 a sound chemical theory. Geoffroi drew up a table show- 

 ing the order in which bodies separate each other from 

 a given substance. 'Thus in the first column the fixed 

 alkalies separate all the bodies below them from the acids. 

 The volatile acids separate all except the fixed alkalies. 

 The absorbent earths separate the metals, and the metals 

 are separated by all the other bodies in the column/ This 

 is a beginning of order, the first real attempt to make a 

 table of equivalents by whatever name it is called. 



The 'Encyclopedic Methodique,' 1786, gives Guyton 



