122 REPORTS ON THE STATE QF SCIENCE. 



The Evolution of the Elements. By F. Soddy. 

 (Ordered by the General Committee to be printed in extenso.) 



' The subject chosen for the discussion which I have been asked to open 

 is ahnost as old as any in philosophy, but the profound change which it 

 lias undergone in the last decade makes it desirable to pause, and, looking 

 backward, to review the standpoint that has been attained. I shall 

 attempt to deal briefly with the historical aspect, in the hope of showing 

 how perfectly the newer ideas dovetail into, and arise naturally out of, 

 the hardly-won articles of scientific belief of a generation ago. The new 

 emphatically does not in any sense subvert the old, but the horizon has 

 greatly extended — how greatly is perhaps hardly yet fully admitted. 

 Facts always remain in modern science, and theories too, in so far as 

 they mirror them completely. So the old facts about the atom and 

 element remain ; but the theories, which are the generalised expression of 

 all the facts, have had in connection with the discovery of radioactivity 

 to accommodate some new facts of a strange, not to say revolutionary, 

 character. The extension of the theories which has been rendered 

 necessary has not been revolutionary in any destructive sense. It is 

 wonderful how accommodating a true theory is to new truth, apparently 

 of a diametrically opposite character, and this not in any sense of mere 

 ingenuity of explanation, but in a manner that arrests the investigator, 

 and is his sign that he is on safe ground. From the very first the best 

 proof of the newer views, to my mind, was in the completeness with 

 which the strange, newly-won knowledge harmonised with the old, and 

 gave to it a still deeper meaning. 



I intend first to consider the distinguishing features of the newer 

 conception of the evolution of the elements, and how it came about that 

 they remained so long unanticipated, either in imagination or discovery. 

 Then the new light that has been shed on some of the oldest problems in 

 the more speculative departments of knowledge must be touched on, and 

 this leads naturally to the question as to what are the limitations of the 

 present position. How far does the new view fail to reveal types of 

 evolution which now may be legitimately imagined to be taking place, 

 and of which the only thing we are certain of is that our present weapons 

 are unequal to the task either of discovering or investigating them 1 

 Again, we have to take into account the poverty of the unaided human 

 imagination and the wealth of suggestion that one fundamentally new 

 point of view awakes. From this point of view, it is true, the advance 

 made points to an extension of possibilities so great as almost to amount 

 to a revolution of thought. Possibilities of the ultimate convergence of 

 these newly discovered processes and activities of matter on the practical 

 problems of life and the future welfare of the race, considered in the 

 light of the known effect of the relatively insignificant forces which 

 have already been harnessed and are taking every day a larger place in 

 our lives, lose none of their suggestiveness for being so vague and incal- 

 culable. Possibilities of a new order of things, a more extended and 

 exalted material destiny than any that have before transpired, even as 

 possibilities, must affect the imagination and lay hold on the thought of 

 the future none the less even if they continue to remain out of reach. It 

 is in this sense that the new discoveries must afi'ect in time the whole 



