Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/598

588 want of electric polarity. No other elements would have resisted such treatment, except those of the argon group. But these are not the only data from which such a conclusion can be drawn; for it was found that no action takes place between argon and hydrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, tellurium, caustic soda, potassium nitrate, sodium peroxide, sodium persulphide, nitro-hydrochloric acid, bromine-water and many other reagents which it would be tedious to mention, all of which are remarkable for their chemical activity. We may therefore take it that the name 'argon,' which means 'inactive,' has been happily chosen.

In attempting to form compounds of argon, however, another consideration was not lost sight of; if compounds of argon were capable of existence, they ought to exist in nature; and as in all probability they would be easily decomposed by heat, it ought to be possible to decompose them with evolution of argon, which could be collected and tested. Professor Miers, in a letter which he wrote me the day after an account of the fruitless attempts to cause argon to combine had been given to the Royal Society, drew my attention to experiments by Dr. Hillebrand of the United States Geological Survey, in course of which he obtained a gas, which he believed to be nitrogen, by treating the rare mineral clevite, a substance found in felspathic rocks in the south of Norway, with sulphuric acid. The chief constituents of clevite are oxides of the rare elements uranium and thorium, and of lead. The gas obtained thus, after purification from nitrogen, was examined in a Plücker tube with the spectroscope, and exhibited a number of brilliant lines, of which the most remarkable was one in the yellow part of the spectrum, similar in color to the light given out by the glowing tube. The position of this line and of others which accompany it established the identity of this gas, not with argon, as was hoped, but with a supposed constituent of the sun's chromosphere, first observed by M. Janssen of Paris, during an eclipse which was visible in India in 1868. The late Sir Edward Frankland, and Sir Norman Lockyer, who studied the spectrum of the chromosphere, gave to the supposititious element, which they regarded as the cause of these lines, the name 'helium,' a word derived from ′ἤλιος′ Greek for 'the sun.' Having been placed on the track, I examined, with the assistance of Dr. Collie and Dr. Travers, no fewer than 51 minerals; while Sir Norman Lockyer examined 46 additional ones, which we had not examined; and in 19 minerals, almost all of them containing uranium, helium was found. Only one gave an argon spectrum, namely malacon. We also sought for argon and helium in meteorites, which all give off gas on heating; but in only one specimen, a meteorite from Augusta County, Virginia, was helium found, in this case accompanied by argon. All natural waters contain argon, for