Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/492

478 and certain of the salts of the alkaline-earth metals, calcium, strontium, and barium, being very readily volatile, upon heating these salts, in the non-luminous flame of a Bunsen gas-burner for example, they undergo vaporization, and their vapors become incandescent and capable of yielding the characteristic emission spectra of the particular metals. In examining in this way the alkali-salt residue of a mineral water from Durkheim, Bunsen observed in the spectrum before him certain colored lines not belonging to any one of the then known alkalies, potash, soda, or lithia; and yet necessarily belonging to some substance having the general characters of an alkali, since all other bodies than alkalies had been previously removed from the residue under examination. In full reliance upon the certainty of this conclusion, Bunsen evaporated some forty tons of the water in question; and from the alkali-salt residue succeeded in extracting and separating salts of two new alkali-metals, each characterized by a well-marked pair of lines in the blue or indigo, and one of them having in addition a pair of well-marked lines of extremely small refrangibility in the red of the spectrum. From its yielding those red lines, the one metal was named rubidium; the other, of which the bright-blue lines were especially characteristic, being called cæsium.

The very general distribution in Nature of these two elements was speedily established, and salts of each of them were, with much labor, eventually prepared in a state of purity and in reasonable quantity. From certain of their respective salts the metals themselves were obtained by the usual processes, and, together with their salts, were submitted to detailed chemical examination. And no sooner was this examination made, than the position of the newly-discovered elements, as members of the alkali-metal family, at once became apparent. Rubidium and cæsium were found in all their properties to present the most striking analogy to potassium, and evidently to stand to this metal in the same relation that strontium and barium respectively stand to calcium; while they differed from sodium, much as strontium and barium respectively differ from magnesium. This relationship in obvious properties was further borne out by the relationship of their atomic weights, thus:

It is observable that the sequence of atomic weight in the thus completed alkali-metal family is strictly parallel to the previously well-known sequences in the alkali-earth metal family, and in the halogen and oxygen families respectively. Moreover, just as the basylity of the alkaline-earth metals increases in the order of their several atomic weights—calcium being less basylous than strontium, and far less basylous than barium—so also is the basylity of potassium inferior to that