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 even the law of the conservation of matter (vide the researches of Curie, Kamsay, Landolt, and others).

In 1902, in a paper entitled "An Attempt towards a Chemical Conception of the Ether," he suggested the existence of two elements having a smaller atomic weight than that of hydrogen, and forming the first two members of the zero group, which comprised the chemically inactive, non-valent gases, helium, neon, argon, xenon, and kryton [sic]; and the first of these two elements he regarded as the ether. He suggested that it is an element having an atomic weight almost incomparably small compared with hydrogen, incapable of forming compounds, but possessing the property, owing to its small atomic weight and extremely high velocity of its atoms, of penetrating and pervading all other substances, just as argon and helium enter into and dissolve in water and other liquids, or hydrogen passes through platinum and palladium. He thinks that coronium, whose spectrum has been found in the solar corona, is one of these two elements, and the ether the other. Of coronium, Mendeléeff says that "it wanders, perhaps for ages, in the regions of space, breaks from the shackles of the earth, and again comes within its sphere, but still it cannot escape from the regions of the sun's attraction, and there are many heavenly bodies of greater mass than the sun."

In 1887 Mendeléeff worked on the nature of solutions, and he regarded them as "homogeneous liquid systems