﻿400 Scientific Intelligence. 



2. On the Genesis of the Elements. — The address by Mr. 

 Crookes, as President of the Chemical Section of the British 

 Association at the Birmingham meeting, was a noteworthy one. 

 He selected for his subject "the nature and the probable — or at 

 least possible — origin of the so-called elements." After quoting 

 from Faraday, Spencer, Lockyer, Brodie, Stokes and Graham to 

 show that " the notion, not necessarily of the decomposability, but 

 at any rate of the complexity of our supposed elements, is, so to 

 speak, in the air of science waiting to take a farther and more 

 definite development," he goes on to discuss the question whether 

 the elements are absolutely and primordially distinct or whether 

 they may not have been evolved from some few antecedent forms 

 of matter — or possibly from only one such — just as it is now held 

 that all the innumerable variations of plants and animals have 

 been developed from fewer and earlier forms of organic life. 

 Conceding that there is no direct evidence of the transmutation 

 of any supposed "element" of our existing list into another, or 

 of its resolution into anything simpler he passes to consider the 

 indirect evidence, that gleaned from the mutual relations of the 

 elementary bodies. Prout's hypothesis, rendered more probable 

 by the half-multiple suggestion of Clarke, shows us that the 

 accepted elements are not coequal but have been formed by a pro- 

 cess of expansion or evolution ; and since analogy points out that 

 the atomic weight of helium is less than that of hydrogen, this 

 may be the element whose atomic weight will substantiate Prout's 

 law. Another piece of evidence is the close association in the 

 earth's crust of certain groups of elements, such as nickel and co- 

 balt, the two groups of platinum metals, and the so-called rare 

 earths occurring in gadolinite, samarskite, etc., which become 

 more numerous the closer they are examined. The features 

 recognizable in these elements seem to point to their formation 

 severally from some common material placed in conditions in 

 each case nearly identical. So too the doctrine of compound 

 radicals or pseudo-elements, furnishes a weighty argument in 

 favor of the compound nature of the elements, a point to which 

 Carnelley has called attention. If pristine matter was once in an 

 intensely heated condition and has reached its present state by a 

 process of free cooling, the elements as we now have them, as 

 Mills has suggested, may be the result of successive polymeriza- 

 tions. The heat given out in the act of polymerization reverses 

 to some extent the polymerization itself and so causes a partial 

 return to the previous condition of things. This forward and 

 backward movement, several times repeated constitutes " period- 

 icity." Mr. Crookes then discusses the periodic law by the aid of 

 a diagram modified by himself from that of Emerson Reynolds, 

 by inverting it, by representing the pendulous swing as gradually 

 declining in amplitude according to a mathematical law, and by 

 introducing another half sw T ing of the pendulum between cerium 

 and lead, which not only renders the oscillations more symmetri- 

 cal, but brings gold, mercury, thallium, lead and bismuth on the 



