452 Scientific Intelligence. 



outside tube as a vacuum which was higher than that used in the 

 X-ray tube itself, and still found neon, the quantity thus obtained 

 being comparable with that present in about 2 cubic centimeters 

 of air. (This announcement is said to have been greeted with 

 loud cheers at the meeting. It may be observed that this amount 

 of neon is very small, corresponding to only about -300" o"o" cc - or 

 0*00000002 g.) Mr. Patterson repeated the experiment twice with 

 the tube surrounded with a vacuum, and finally found helium 

 mixed with neon in the outside vacuous tube. Ramsay accounts 

 for the successive appearance of helium and neon in the tubes by 

 suggesting that helium (4) plus oxygen (16) equals neon (20). 



Sir J. J. Thomson has published a letter in regard to this 

 matter. By using the method of positive rays, which is more sensi- 

 tive than spectrum analysis and furnishes much more definite infor- 

 mation about the gases, he has observed the appearance of helium 

 and a gas of atomic weight 20, presumably neon, in discharge 

 tubes, as well as a new gas of atomic weight 3, which he calls 

 X 3 , considers as possibly made up of three atoms of hydrogen, and 

 which apparently does not occur in the atmosphere. He has 

 found no connection between the appearance of these gases and 

 the gas used to fill the bulb, but his experiments show that by 

 bombarding various metals and other bodies with cathode rays 

 these gases appear. His conclusions are different from those 

 brought forward at the meeting of the Chemical Society, for he 

 has found that, using iron wire terminals with an arc discharge, 

 the gases appeared at first but diminished and finally failed to 

 appear after the same terminals had been employed repeatedly, 

 but with new terminals the gases appeared once more. He says, 

 " This experiment seems to me to point very clearly to the con- 

 clusion that these gases were in the terminals to begin with, were 

 removed from them by long-continued sparking, and were not 

 produced de novo by the arc." He points out a remarkable dif- 

 ference between the liberation of these gases and the violent ex- 

 pulsion of helium by radio-active substances. After a sample of 

 lead had been boiled in a vacuum, the residual metal still gave off 

 the gases under the influence of the discharge, but they were 

 removed by long-continued sparking. 



We are forced to conclude from Thomson's results that the 

 only transmutations of the elements thus far known are sponta- 

 neous, and that no case of artificial transmutation has been defi- 

 nitely established. — Chem. News, cviii, 18; Nature, Feb. 13, 1913. 



h. l. w. 



2. An Active Form of Nitrogen. — When a jar-discharge is 

 passed through nitrogen at low pressure the gas retains a yellow 

 glow after the discharge has stopped. This gradually fades away 

 and disappears after about one minute. For some time Steutt 

 in England has been investigating this phenomenon, and finds 

 that the gas has remarkable properties. The glow gives a char- 

 acteristic band-spectrum which is similar to the nitrogen spectrum 

 obtained by using the uncondensed discharge, but not identical 



