Le Fluor et ses Composés

Abstract

THERE could scarcely be a greater contrast than that between the gaseous substances most recently added to our list of elements; fluorine on the one hand, argon and its companions on the other. The existence of the hypothetical element fluorine was postulated in many well-investigated compounds as early as the beginning of the present century; yet, on account of its intense chemical activity, fluorine was not prepared as a free element until 1886, despite the numberless attempts which had been made to isolate it in the intervening period. Argon, on the other hand, owing to its absolute inertness, and to the fact of its occurrence along with the very inert nitrogen, led an unsuspected existence until 1894, although it was contained in enormous quantities in the atmosphere—a constant subject of investigation. The compounds of fluorine, then, were known long before the element itself,—compounds of argon are still wanting. Indeed, as has been pointed out (Sedgwick, “Argon and Newton,” p. 2), the name element in the ordinary sense cannot properly be applied to argon and its companions at all, since that term implies the existence, or at least the possibility of existence, of compounds concerning which we are still in total ignorance. As yet there is no chemistry of argon.

Le Fluor et ses Composés.

Par M. Henri Moissan. Pp. xii + 396. (Paris: G. Steinheil, 1900).