Manchester Memoirs, Vol. xlviii. (1903), No. 1. 7 



indicated, the most interesting of which was the attempt to 

 effect the mutual transmutations of argon and nitrogen 

 by the changes manifested in their spectra when these 

 elements were sparked under different conditions of 

 pressure and temperature and with electrodes of different 

 metals. The experiments are described in a note presented 

 to the French Academy of Sciences in i897\ While the 

 results of these attempts at transmutation were entirely 

 negative, science was advanced by them through my 

 discovery of new spectral lines of oxygen and of thallium^, 

 the new line 6560 of thallium establishing a more simple 

 relation of the spectra of the elements and their atomic 

 weights than those shown by any other of the series of 

 elementary substances^ 



Through the recent inventions of the radio-electroscope 

 and the improved methods of producing extremely low 

 temperatures. Professors Rutherford, Soddy and Ramsay 

 have shown that helium is spontaneously and continuously 

 evolved from radium^ Now in this result, we have a clear 

 instance of the resolution of the higher element X=i84 

 into the lower typical molecule H2 of the same series as 

 prevised in my paper read before the Society in 1878, and 

 shown in the Table subjoined to my subsequent paper 

 published by the Society in 1902°. The resolution of 

 radium into helium confirms the positions of both these 

 elements in my Table, and also the wide separation of 

 helium from the argon family with which it has hitherto 

 been classified solely on account of its property of 

 chemical inertness. 



In view of the order in which other instances of trans- 



^ Comptes rendus, Tome 125, p. 649, 1897. 



* Ibid., p. 708. 



* Proc. Roy. Soc, Vol. 53, pp. 369-372. 



* Nature, July i6th, 1903. Proc. Roy. Soc, July 28th, 1903. 

 ° Manchester Memoirs, Vol. XLVi., (14), 1902, 



