CONGRUITY OF THE EVIDENCE 295 



apart in proportion to their size as the planets in the solar system." ' 

 While Professor Rutherford^ has shown that the behaviour of 

 radium, as well as of thorium and uranium, is only to be explained 

 on the idea that they are elements in the process of slow "spon- 

 taneous transformation." Yet, during this process of molecular 

 disintegration, radium, like its allies, " may be looked upon as contin- 

 uously giving rise to new elements by a process of material evolution." 

 One of these new elements has now been definitely ascertained by 

 Sir William Ramsay to be the well-known gas helium — first dis- 

 covered by the spectroscope as one of the constituents of the sun. 

 The ' emanation ' given off from radium has all the characters of a 

 gas, and, when kept in a tube, it changed itself first into this rare gas 

 helium, and then into particles of positive and negative electricity 

 (electrons). Doubtless, other of the products of transformations of 

 this kind will soon be identified, and it will be generally recognised 

 that even the " spontaneous generation " — hitherto unknown — 

 of so-called chemical elements is, under suitable conditions, ever 

 taking place around us, not only in the bodies above-mentioned 

 but in many others according to Gustave le Bon, who looks upon 

 electrons as intermediate stages between what we know as matter 

 and the ether, from which, in ways altogether unknown, the 

 different so-called elements have been derived.3 



After such revelations, who would dogmatise and attempt to 

 set bounds to the potencies of matter, living or not living? 

 Let us think of what is known as to the great complexity of the 

 molecules of proteid substances, and the further extreme com- 

 plexity of the units of living matter which they help to form. Let 

 us then attempt to add to this conception a further conception 

 based upon these modern revelations as to the constitution of even 

 the simplest atom entering into the formation of protoplasm, and, 

 even if willing to accept what is attested by observation and 



' It is supposed now by many authorities that there is "in the core of the atom 

 nothing but a group of positive electrons, forming a body like our sun, round 

 which their negative partners revolve at distances and in orbits corresponding 

 not imperfectly to those of the planets . . and the diiTerence of chemical and 

 physical behaviour displayed by, for instance, an atom of hydrogen and another 

 of iron, is accounted for by supposing the planets of one to be either more 

 numerous or to have different orbits from those of others " (" Athensum," May 27, 



1905, P- 551)- 



= " The Times Literary Supplement," June 26, 1903. 



3 "L'Evolution de la Matiere," Paris, 1905. He supports the view that 

 electrons are " centres of vortical strain in the ether." 



