326 Messrs. Cross and Bevan on Pseudo- Carbons. 



hypothesis framed upon similitudes, and to forsake the rigid 

 requirements of the experimental method where it offers a 

 vista of complexity and the higher mathematics. But perhaps 

 we ought rather to regard the errors in question in the light 

 merely of a confession of postponement of a problem which 

 the science has not yet been in a position to attack, or in favour 

 of the larger number of those more immediately pressing. 

 Still we cannot avoid the conclusion that this has been rather 

 thought than expressed, at least in writing ; and whatever be 

 the cause, the persistent use of the terms of which we are 

 speaking amounts to a really grave error. At the outset, there- 

 fore, we would propose the term pseudo-carbons for the black 

 substances, containing a more or less high percentage of car- 

 bon, which are formed in various modes of resolution of the 

 carbon compounds, — including thereby the coals and graphites 

 of "natural " origin, the charcoals &c. of pyrogenic origin, and 

 those substances which are formed by " carbonizing " organic 

 substances by chemical treatment. 



The main aspect of these various modes of resolution is un- 

 doubtedly the accumulation of carbon; and the conclusion is 

 unavoidable that they are conditioned by the tendency of the 

 carbon atoms to unite with one another, i. e. to form con- 

 densed molecules. This property of the element is the very 

 basis of its special chemistry, and of the widest significance in 

 the living world; and in this its last expression (i. e. tending to 

 pass from the combined to the elementary condition) we see 

 the crowning chapter of its remarkable history. In our inter- 

 pretation, however, of this chapter we should guard against a 

 spurious ideal, and ask ourselves, Are there any facts which 

 warrant the conclusion that the elementary condition could be 

 attained by any process of cumulative resolution of carbon 

 compounds? and, further, Does not the mathematical analogy 

 of series proceeding by a definite law of development (and 

 that these bodies have been or can be developed through infi- 

 nite series is an unavoidable inference) indicate its impossi- 

 bility, except under the operation of a new cause ? 



Berthelot*, we believe, was the first to apply this mode of 

 reasoning to the case in question, and to regard the hydrogen 

 and oxygen present in these pseudo-carbons as essential con- 

 stituents, and the pseudo-carbons themselves, therefore, as a 

 complex of compounds (0, H, 0) of very high molecular weight. 

 Mills has given us a more general view of such molecular 

 condensations in his theory of Cumulative Resolution f ; but 

 the attendant phenomena are in this group of resolutions too 

 complex, and as yet insufficiently investigated, to allow of 



* Ann. Chem. Phijs. [5] xvii. p. 139. t Phil. Mag. Suppl. June 1877. 



