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define or explain an element, none satisfy the demands of the 
human intellect. The text-books tell us that an element is ‘‘a 
body which has not been decomposed” ; that it is ‘fa something 
to which we can add, but from which we can take away nothing, ” 
or, ‘‘a body which increases in weight with every chemical 
change.” Such definitions are doubly unsatisfactory : they are 
provisional, and may cease to-morrow to be applicable in any 
given case. They take theirstand, not on any attribute of the 
things to be defined, but on the limitations of human power ; 
they are confessions of intellectual impotence. 
Just as to Columbus long philosophic meditation led him to the 
fixed belief of the existence of a yet untrodden world beyond that 
waste of Atlantic waters, so to our most keen-eyed chemists, phy- 
sicists, and philosophers a variety of phenomena suggest the con- 
viction that the elements of ordinary assumption are not theultimate 
boundary in this direction of the knowledge which man may 
hope to attain, Well do I remember, soon after I had obtained 
evidence of the distinct nature of thallium, that Faraday said to 
me—‘‘ To discover a new element is a very fine thing, but if you 
could decompose an element and tell us what it is made of— 
that would be a discovery indeed worth making.” And this was 
no new speculation of Faraday’s, for in one of his early lectures 
he remarked—“‘ At present we begin to feel impatient, and to 
wish for a new state of chemical elements. For a time the 
desire was to add to the metals, now we wish to diminish their 
number. . . . To decompose the metals, then, to re-form them, 
to change them from one to another, and to realise the once 
absurd notion of transmutation, are the problems now given to 
the chemist for solution.” 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his hypothesis of the constitution of 
matter, says : ‘‘ All material substances are divisible into so-called 
elementary substances composed of molecular particles of the 
same nature as themselves ; but these molecular particles are 
complicated structures consisting of congregations of truly ele- 
mentary atoms, identical in nature and differing only in position, 
arrangement, motion, &c., and the molecules or chemical atoms 
are produced from the true or physical atoms by processes of 
evolution under conditions which chemistry has not yet been 
able to reproduce.”’ 
Mr. Norman Lockyer has shown, I think on good evidence, 
that in the heavenly bodies of the highest temperature a large 
number of our reputed elements are dissociated, or, as it would 
perhaps be better to say, have never been formed. Mr. Lockyer 
holds that ‘‘the temperature of the sun and the electric arc is 
high enough to dissociate some of the so-called chemical ele- 
ments, and give us a glimpse of the spectra of their bases” ; and 
he likewise says that ‘‘a terrestrial element is an exceedingly 
complicated thing that is broken up into simpler things at the 
temperature of the sun, and some of these things exist in some 
sun-spots, while other constituents exist in others.” 
The late Sir Benjamin Brodie, in a lecture on ‘Ideal 
Chemistry ” delivered before the Chemical Society in 1867, goes 
even further than this. He says :—‘* We may conceive that, in 
remote time or in remote space, there did exist formerly, or 
possibly do exist now, certain simpler forms of matter than we 
find on the surface of our globe—a, x, &, v, and so on. . 
We may consider that in remote ages the temperature of matter 
was much higher than it is now, and that these other things 
existed then in the state of perfect gases—separate existences— 
uncombined. . . . We may then conceive that the temperature 
began to fall, and these things to combine with one another and to 
enter into new forms of existence, appropriate to the circum- 
stances in which they were placed... . . We may further con- 
sider that, as the temperature went on falling, certain forms of 
matter became more permanent and more stable, to the exclusion 
of other forms. . . . We may conceive of this process of the 
lowering of the temperature going on, so that these substances, 
when once formed, could never be decomposed—in fact, that the 
resolution of these bodies into their component elements could 
never occur again. You would then have something of our 
present system of things. . 
‘Now this is not purely an imagination, for when we look 
upon the surface of our globe we have actual evidence of similar 
changes in Nature. . - When we look at some of the facts 
which have been revealed to us by the extraordinary analyses 
which have been made of the matter of distant worlds and 
nebula, by means of the spectroscope, it does not seem incredi- 
ble to me that there may even be evidence, some day, of the 
independent existence of such things as x and v.” 
In his Burnett Lectures ‘*On Light as a Means of Investiga- 
NATURE 
[Sep¢. 2, 1886 
tion,” Prof. Stokes, speaking of a line in the spectrum of the 
nebul, says :—‘It may possibly indicate some form of matter 
more elementary than any we know on earth. There seems no 
@ priori improbability in such a supposition so great as to lead us 
at once to reject it. Chemists have long speculated on the so- 
called elements, or many of them, being merely very stable 
compounds of elements of a higher order, or even perhaps of a 
single kind of matter.” 
In 1868 Graham wrote of Sir W. Thomson’s vortex-ring 
theory as enlivening “‘ matter into an individual existence and 
constituting it a distinct substance or element.” 
From these passages, which might easily be multiplied, it 
plainly appears that the notion—not necessarily of the decom- 
posability, but at any rate of the complexity, of our supposed 
elements—is, so to speak, in the air of science, waiting to take 
a further and more definite development. It is important to keep 
before men’s minds the idea of the genesis of the elements ; this 
gives some form to our conceptions, and accustoms the mind to 
look for some physical production of atoms. It is still more im- 
portant, too, to keep in view the great probability that there 
exist in Nature laboratories where atoms are formed, and labora- 
tories where atoms cease to be. Weare on the track and are 
not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region 
which ignorance tickets ‘‘ Unknown.” It is for us to strive to 
unravel the secret composition even of the so-called elements— 
to undauntedly persevere—and ‘‘still bear up right onward.” 
If we adopt the easy-going assumption that the elements, 
whether self-existent or created, are absolutely and primordially 
distinct ; that they existed as we now find them prior to the 
origin of stars and their attendant planets, constituting, in fact, 
the primal ‘‘fire-mist,” we are little, if any, the wiser. 
We look at their number and at their distinctive properties, 
and we ask, Are all these points accidental or determinate ? 
In other words, might there as well have been only 7, 
or 709, or 7000 absolutely distinct elements as the 70 (in 
round numbers) which we now commonly recognise? The 
number of the elements does not, indeed, commend itself to our 
reason from any @ frioré or extraneous considerations. Might 
their properties have conceivably differed from those which we 
actually observe? Are they formed by a “ fortuitous concatena- 
tion,” or do they constitute together a definite whole, in which 
each has its proper pert to play, and from which none could be 
extruded without leaving a recognisable deficiency ? : 
If their peculiarities were accidental, it would scarcely be 
possible for the elements to display those mutual relations which 
we find brought into such prominent light and order in the 
periodic classification of Newlands, Mendeléeff, and Meyer. 
Has not the relation between the atomic weights of the three 
halogens, chlorine, bromine, and iodine, and their serially vary- 
ing properties, physical and chemical, been worn nearly thread- 
bare? And the same with the calcium and the sulphur groups ? 
Surely the probability of such relations existing among some 
seventy bodies which had come into fortuitous existence would 
prove to be vanishingly small ! 
We ask whether these elements may not have been evolved 
from some few antecedent forms of matter—or possibly from only 
one such—just as it is now held that all the innumerable varia- 
tions of plants and animals have been developed from fewer 
and earlier forms of organic life? As Dr. Gladstone well puts 
it, they ‘have been built up from one another, according to 
some general plan.” This building up, or evolution, is above 
all things not fortuitous : the variation and development which 
we recognise in the universe run along certain fixed lines which 
have been preconceived and foreordained. To the careless and 
hasty eye, design and evolution seem antagonistic ; the more 
careful inquirer sees that evolution, steadily proceeding along an 
ascending scale of excellence, is the strongest argument in favour 
of a preconceived plan. 
The array of the elements cannot fail to remind us of the 
general aspect of the organic world. In both cases we see 
certain groups well filled up, even crowded with forms having 
among themselves but little specific difference. On the other 
hand, in both, other forms stand widely isolated. Both display 
species that are common and species that are rare; both have 
groups widely distributed—it might be said cosmopolitan, and 
other groups of very restricted occurrence. Among animals I 
may mention as instances the Monotremata of Australia and 
New Guinea, and among the elements the metals of the so-called 
rare earths. 
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