Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/45

Rh by Dalton and retained by succeeding chemists and physicists for no good reason. Perhaps because imitation is a characteristic inherited from our simian ancestry, and is so much easier for us than originality. Many a chemist looks askance at any tampering with the atoms, apparently fearing that it may hurt them, or even destroy them utterly and the atomic weights with them. Or he trembles for his spidery and tenuous structural formula?, knowing full well that if deprived of these he will be irretrievably lost in a labyrinth, without a thread to guide him. While, if he is not permitted to think of the carbon atom as a little chunk of matter, tetrahedral in form, he thinks he is launched on a sea of troubles.

, But all this apprehension arises from a misunderstanding. That the atomic weights remain unharmed and unaltered, as the units for chemical calculations, and that nothing which is good or useful about the atomic theory is destroyed or even assailed by the new ideas, that the trend of these new ideas is unmistakably constructive and not destructive, are best shown by a review of the arguments in favor of the hypothesis that the atom is divisible, and that our elements are not elements in the true sense of the word.

There is nothing new in this view; it formed the first article of the faith of the alchemists. It was unqualifiedly denied by Dalton, and fell into such disrepute that even within recent years one risked being called a dreamer, or even a fool, if he dared to consider it possible. Here again is an instance of the desirability of being as precise as possible in the use of terms. Many believe experimental evidence of the complexity of 'elementary atoms' and the existence of one 'mother substance' must be followed immediately by directions for transforming elements into one another; by the transmutation of baser metals into gold. But these are two wholly distinct propositions. An astronomer might locate a mountain of gold on the surface of the moon, but there would still be a goodly chasm to bridge before he derived much material benefit from his discovery!

The idea that there is one fundamental substance would not down. The hypothesis of the English physician, Prout, is a familiar one. When the atomic weight of hydrogen is set equal to unity, the atomic weights of all the other elements come out remarkably close to whole numbers. There exist numerous groups of three elements, commonly called Döbereiner's triads, the individual members of one group being similar in their chemical properties, and so related that the atomic weight of the middle member is the arithmetic mean of the atomic weights of the extreme members. These are the facts which led Prout to suggest that there was but one element, namely, hydrogen, the others being complexes containing different quantities of this ultimate substance. It followed that the differences between the atomic weights and whole numbers were to be ascribed to experimental errors in the