8oo 
Are the Chemical Elements [December, 
dead, and the third died soon after. The shift boss reports 
that “ the accident was due solely to the heat, as the air is 
good enough and pure enough, barring the heat.” The 
winze was not an abandoned one, but in daily use. A heavy 
volume of steam is reported to rise through it from the 
1900 level, the temperature of which, at the time of this 
accident, is given at 128° F. Mr. Church gathers from the 
detailed account that the death of the men is possibly 
attributable to the fa< 5 t that when the miner fell off the car 
the latter was stopped in a place that was hotter than the 
rest of the winze. 
It is to be regretted that no adequate studies have been 
made upon the precise physiological phenomena presented 
by death under these circumstances. The legal require- 
ments are satisfied when it is proved that the casualties are 
due to heat. 
V. ARE THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS 
SIMPLE BODIES? 
S HE researches which have been made in the various 
branches of physical science during the last few years 
have many of them been of unusual importance. 
Some — the telephone and microphone, for instance — have 
already resulted in the invention of instruments of great 
practical utility, while others have opened up new fields for 
research, and bid fair to effect a complete reversal of the 
generally-accepted notions concerning Matter. As Prof. 
W. B. Rogers remarked, in his Presidential Address at the 
1879 Meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences — “ In 
all branches of discovery we seem to be catching the clews 
of far-reaching thought that stretch out where as yet no 
man’s foot has trodden. The recent developments in 
Chemistry, through the agency of the spectroscope, and the 
effects of heat in dissociation, have suggested, if they have 
not proved, that a number of the substances hitherto re- 
garded as elements are hereafter to be regarded as compound. 
The investigation of the laws of chemical a< 5 tion following 
out the suggestions made at the beginning of the century by 
