Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/248

242 it will be the most stunning fact that has come into science for a hundred years. The nebula theory, the doctrine of evolution, and the antiquity of man will be trifles compared with its significance.

Chemistry, though, with or without that fact, has a wonderful field where one may work intelligently in a constructive way. Compounds both inorganic and organic have been produced in great variety, and some chemists are at work trying to make artificially many things which one has to depend upon nature for now—thus quinine, now used in such great quantity; others are sugar or albumen for food, or nitrates for fertilizers, and so on. All these products, if produced on a commercial scale, would be of enormous worth to the world. Aside from these the chemical preparation of antitoxins for the relief and cure of many diseases, cholera, plague, yellow-fever, typhoid fever, are all being sought for with a great probability that they will be discovered and the life of men be saved for many years. I wish I could say that if life be saved and kept by such artificial means that mankind would not seek other ways of decimating its ranks. The average life of the Jews is upwards of seventy years. If all men had the same degree of vitality the world would be so crowded in a hundred or two hundred years that only the loss of fertility would save the necessity for famine, war and pestilence. Chemistry may give us a boon and leave nature to find some other resource for reducing numbers. That such resource would be radically different from her past methods is not very probable.

Physics is that science which is concerned with transformable energy and its transformations under all kinds of conditions. The energy may be mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, gravitational, physiological or mental. So long as they are transformable they are all departments of physics. The nineteenth century correlated them all and showed the conditions for transformation and the nature of several forms, thus heat, as vibratory atomic and molecular motion, radiant energy a wave motion in the ether. The discovery of the ether and many of its phenomena belongs also to it. The development of many arts and industries followed the new knowledge, so we have now, for instance, the electrical industries in many ways, the spectroscope and its astronomical revelations, the telescope grown from a four inch objective to a four foot objective.

The old ideas of the nature of matter or of atoms have all been abandoned and we have come to the conclusion that matter is not inert but is loaded with energy, that indeed the ether is saturated with it, though it is available to us only through the agency of matter, which acts as a transformer and a distributor of it. Yet we need to know much more of it. There is more to be learned about chemistry in its relation to physics than any seems to have considered hitherto. It is the form of energy which is present in atoms. Thus when hydrogen