The new dominion. [volume] (Morgantown, W. Va.) 1876-1904, 1879-01-04
A Remarkable Discovery Announced
by Mr.. Norman Lockyer.
ILondon telegraph

AhNuuou AeieSTAph,J
BY the announcement which Mr.. Nor
man Lockyer has just made to the Paris
Academy of Science, to the effect that
he believes he has succeeded in realizing
Faraday's famous prophecy with regard
to reducing the so-called chemical ele-
ments to air, the prospect of another
grand discovery is added to the series of
extraordinary facts which have marked
the scientific annals of the present year.
Nj, Dumas, the venerable and accom-
phshed French chemist, was the medium
through whom Mr.. Lockyer conveyed
these startling tidings, The sixty odd
elements, of which, according to the
school-bcoks now in Use, all terrestrial
matter is composed, are in reality, it is
said, not elementary, but compound
bodies. Science has been deceiving
itself with mere Protean combinations
of one arch-substanee. Instead of sixty
or seventy elements, the number may be
even less than the traditional four
earth, air, fire and water which held
to long sway, IRON the Aristotelian
period until the days of Robert Boyle.
In making the communication to the
Paris Academy, M. Dumas added that
the conclusion reached by Mr.. Lockyer
was the result of three years assiduous
research. Conscious of its extraordinary
character and of the entirely new aspect
which the discovery will give to chem
zeal science, Mr. Lockyer states that he
will send photographs ard other details,
which the Academy will rightly look
for with suspended belief. In the mean
while, our distinguished savant has no
hesitation in publicly disclosing the
specific character of his discovery, which
has been accomplished by the use of
that most potent and magical of modern
instruments of analysis, the spectre
scope.
The honor of achieving a prodigous
analytical success, which, if verified.
must ever be memorable in the history
of molecular physics, has for some years
past been an object of strenuous rivalry
among few of our leading scientific
workers. The eventual dissertation of
the so-called elements was confidently
contemplated by Faraday nearly thirty
years ago, and it is not too much to say
that the expectations entertained by
that eminent man gave stimulus for
work in the laboratory which has never
been lost by those who were privileged
to be learners or fellow -laborers with
him. Since Faraday's time, the whole
question of the physical constitution of
the universe, and especially the particu-
lar manner in which creative power may
have gradually elaborated the present
cosmical order of things, has been in
yestigated with zest, and, it may be
added, with facilities for discovery,
importance to inquiries into the ele-
mentary and primal forms Ct matter.
The apparently well-grounded belief
that the heavens afford to the view OF
the astronomer the process of world-mak-
ing in its various stages, has done much of
late years to encourage the particular
branch of research which now seems to
be yielding such extraordinary and
valuable results. Mr. Lockyer believes
that, III spite of the multiform aspects
of the world in which we live, there is
but one form of matter which is truly
elementary. The primal element is
presented to US in the shape of hydrogen.
1t is not little remarkable that the
nature of hydrogen should have been a
question to which the leading French
chemists have recently been devoting
their energies. 1t is now well known,
thanks to M. Picket and his French
colleagues, that hydrogen, in its gaseous
form, can be, and has been, reduced to
a liquid condition. Mr.. Lockyer him.
self has arrived, by means of the spectre
scope, at the conclusion that hydrogen
can no longer be regarded as simple
element. Further, he believes he has
proved that hydrogen is the one body of
which the various metals and earths
that have hitherto constituted the
chemists catalogue of elements are
composed. So novel and striking an in
depreciation of all the phenomena of
animate nature, of all that we can see in
the starry depths around us, as we'll as
ON our own globe, is difficult at first
sight to entertain. That the substance
we have therefore, known as a single
unit in the great cosmical laboratory
should be endowed with such Protean
capacities of form, is conception which
utterly eclipses all that poetry or mythol-
ogy has ever inspired, and the world
becomes infinitely more wonderful by
such revelations as now seem to be
brought within our knowledge.