Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/292

278 parts; and it is a very simple mechanical deduction that the larger molecules will, as a rule, have a slower rate of vibration than the smaller ones—very much in the same way as a short string gives a higher note than a long one. The color of chlorine changes just in the way we should expect if the molecules, instead of going about separately, were hanging together in couples; and the same thing is true of a great number of the metals. Mr. Lockyer, in his admirable researches, has shown that several of the metals and metalloids have various spectra, according to the temperature and the pressure to which they are exposed; and he has made it exceedingly probable that these various spectra, that is, the rates of vibration of the molecules, depend upon the molecules being actually of different sizes. Dr. Roscoe has, a few months ago, shown an entirely new spectrum of the metal sodium, whereby it appears that this metal exists in a gaseous state in four different degrees of aggregation, as a simple molecule, and as three or four or eight molecules together. Every increase in the complication of the molecules—every extra molecule you hang on to the aggregate that goes about together—will make a difference in the rate of the vibration of that system, and so will make a difference in the color of the substance.

So, then, we have an evidence, you see, of an entirely extraneous character, that in a given gas the actual molecules that exist are not all of the same weight. Any experiment which failed to detect this would fail to detect any smaller difference. And here also we can see a reason why, although a difference in the size of the molecules does exist, yet we do not find that out by sifting. Suppose you take oxygen gas consisting of single molecules and double molecules, and you sift it through a plate; the single molecules get through first, but, when they get through, some of them join themselves together as double molecules; and, although more double molecules are left on the other side, yet some of them separate up and make single molecules; so the process of sifting, which ought to give you single molecules on the one side and double on the other, merely gives you a mixture of single and double on both sides; because the reasons which originally decided that there should be just those two forms are always at work, and continually setting things right.

Now let us take the other point in which molecules are very nearly alike; viz., that they have very nearly the same rate of vibration. The metal sodium in the common salt upon the earth has two rates of vibration; it sounds two notes, as it were, which are very near to each other. They form the well-known double line. The two bright yellow lines are very easy to observe. They occur in the spectra of a great number of stars. They occur in the solar spectrum as dark lines, showing that there is sodium in the outer rim of the sun, which is stopping and shutting off the light of the bright parts behind, and all these lines of sodium are just in the same position in the spectrum,