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177
The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry
·
M. M. Pattison Muir
166
Since
the
time
of
Lavoisier,
since
the
last
decade
of
the
eighteenth
century,
careful
chemists
have
meant
by
an
element
a
substance
which
has
not
been
separated
into
unlike
parts,
and
they
have
not
meant
more
than
that.
The
term
element
has
been
used
by
accurate
thinkers
as
a
useful
class-mark
which
connotes
a
property--the
property
of
not
having
been
decomposed--common
to
all
substances
placed
in
the
class,
and
differentiating
them
from
all
other
substances.
Whenever
chemists
have
thought
of
elements
as
the
ultimate
kinds
of
matter
with
which
the
physical
world
is
constructed--and
they
have
occasionally
so
thought
and
written--they
have
fallen
into
quagmires
of
confusion.
Of
course,
the
elements
may,
some
day,
be
separated
into
unlike
parts.
The
facts
of
radio-activity
certainly
suggest
some
kind
of
inorganic
evolution.
Whether
the
elements
are
decomposed
is
to
be
determined
by
experimental
inquiry,
remembering
always
that
no
number
of
failures
to
simplify
them
will
justify
the
assertion
that
they
cannot
be
simplified.
Chemistry
neither
asserts
or
denies
the
decomposability
of
the
elements.
At
present,
we
have
to
recognise
the
existence
of
extremely
small
quantities,
widely
distributed
in
rocks
and
waters,
of
some
thirty
substances,
the
minute
particles
of
which
are
constantly
emitting
streams
of
more
minute,
identical
particles
that
carry
with
them
very
large
quantities
of
energy,
all
of
which
thirty
substances
are
characterised,
and
are
differentiated
from
all
other
classes
of
substances
wherewith
chemistry
is
concerned,
by
their
spontaneous
mutability,
and
each
is
characterised
by
its
special
rate
of
change
and
by
the
nature
of
the
products
of
its
mutations.
We
have
now
to
think
of
the
minute
particles
of
two
of
the
seventy-five
or
eighty
substances
which
until
the
other
day
had
not
been
decomposed,
and
were
therefore
justly
called
elements,
as
very
slowly
emitting
streams
of
minuter
particles
and
producing
characteristic
products
of
their
disintegration.
And
we
have
to
think
of
some
eighty
substances
as
particular
kinds
of
matter,
at
present
properly
called
elements,
because
they
are
characterised,
and
differentiated
from
all
other
substances,
by
the
fact
that
none
of
them
has
been
separated
into
unlike
parts.
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