﻿Chemistry and Physios. 401 



side where they are in complete harmony with members of the 

 foregoing groups. "The more I study the arrangement of this 

 zigzag curve," he says, " the more I am convinced that he who 

 grasps the key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest 

 mysteries of creation. Let us imagine if it is possible to get a 

 glimpse of a few of the secrets here hidden. Let us picture the 

 very beginnings of time, before geological ages, before the earth 

 was thrown off from the central nucleus of molten fluid, before 

 even the sun himself had consolidated from the original protyle. 

 Let us still imagine that at this primal stage all was in an ultra- 

 gaseous state at a temperature inconceivably hotter than anything 

 now existing in the visible universe; so high indeed that the 

 chemical atoms could not yet have been formed, being still far 

 above their dissociation-point. In so far as protyle is capable of 

 radiating or reflecting, this vast sea of incandescent mist, to an 

 astronomer in a distant star, might have appeared as a nebula 

 showing in the spectroscope a few isolated lines, forecasts of 

 hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen spectra. But in course of time 

 some process akin to cooling, probably internal, reduces the tem- 

 perature of the cosmic protyle to a point at which the first step in 

 granulation takes place; matter, as we know it, comes into exist- 

 ence and atoms are formed. As soon as an atom is formed out 

 of protyle it is a store of energy, potential (from its tendency to 

 coalesce with other atoms by gravitation or chemically) and 

 kinetic (from its internal motions). To obtain this energy the 

 neighboring protyle must be refrigerated by it and thereby the 

 subsequent formation ol other atoms will be accelerated. But 

 with atomic matter, the various forms of energy which require 

 matter to render them evident begin to act ; and amongst others, 

 that form of energy which has for one of its factors what we now 

 call atomic weight. Let us assume that the elementary protyle 

 contains within itself the potentiality of every possible combining 

 proportion or atomic weight. Let it be granted that the whole 

 of our known elements were not at this epoch simultaneously 

 created. The easiest formed element, the one most nearly allied 

 to the protyle in simplicity is first born. Hydrogen — or shall we 

 say helium — of all the known elements the one of simplest struc- 

 ture and lowest atomic weight, is the first to come into being. 

 For some time hydrogen would be the only form of matter (as we 

 now know it) in existence, and between hydrogen and the next 

 formed element there would be a considerable gap in time, during 

 the latter part of which the element next in order of simplicity 

 would be slowly approaching its birth-point ; pending this period 

 we may suppose that the evolutionary process which was soon to 

 determine the birth of a new element would also determine its 

 atomic weight, its affinities and its chemical position. In the 

 original genesis, the longer the time occupied in that portion of 

 the cooling down during which the hardening of the protyle into 

 atoms took place, the more sharply defined would be the resulting 

 element ; and on the other hand with more irregularity in the 



