12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 65 



It should be noted in this connection that Werner, some years ago, 

 put forward a theory of stereochemical phenomena (described in 

 his " Stereochemie," pp. 48-50, 224) which discarded the notion of 

 directed action, and represented the atom as exerting a uniform 

 attractive force in all directions, without specifying the nature of 

 that force. It did not profess to have a physical basis of any sort, 

 but was meant to be nothing more than a symbolical representation 

 of the facts, being directed chiefly against the narrow mechanical 

 views of the time, according to which the Carbon atom was an actual 

 tetrahedron and so forth. It is true that all the stereochemical phe- 

 nomena for which ultra-mechanical explanations were at one time 

 favored, such as optical activity, " ethylene " isomerism, and the 

 facts that gave rise to Baeyer's " Strain Theory," or Bischoff's 

 " Dynamic Hypothesis," can be better pictured by using the concep- 

 tion of equilibrium between more diffuse forces ; but a compromise 

 seems desirable on account of the difficulty in imagining the exact 

 nature of such forces. Apart from other objections, a force like that 

 of gravitation is too promiscuous in its action, while no concrete 

 scheme of electrically charged or electrically polarized atoms is 

 flexible enough to be consistently followed out through the molecule 

 of the average Carbon compound. " Werner's Theory," then, is not 

 a theory of chemical action so much as a clear statement of the 

 conditions with which such a theory must comply. It will be seen 

 that the structures derived for the atoms in this paper permit that 

 mobility of linkages, the recognition of which led to the proposal of 

 Werner's theory, without giving up the idea of definite units of 

 combining action. 



If, then, the valence electrons are in positions of equilibrium near 

 the surface of the atom, the other electrons cannot have any trans- 

 lational motion, for these two states cannot coexist in the same 

 system, except in the special case where the stationary electrons lie 

 on the axis about which the others rotate. Now any attempt to 

 reconcile this result with the certainty that there is some kind of 

 orbital motion of electric charges within the atom leads inevitably to 

 the idea of the magneton. 



Again, theories involving rotating rings of electrons do not seem 

 to provide a really satisfactory derivation of the valences of atoms. 

 With them it is a question of how many electrons are stable in one 

 ring; how many pass into another; and so on. Now, even if a 

 limited agreement with the facts can sometimes be secured, the idea 

 of rings of electrons cannot possibly harbor any essential peculiarity 

 that could explain the definite system of " octaves " which is the 



