Abstract
THE elements of the chemist are now known to be complex in three different senses. In the first sense the complexity is one that concerns the general nature of matter, and therefore of all the elements in common to a greater or less degree. It follows from the relations between matter and electricity which have developed gradually during the past century as the result of experiments made and theories born within the four walls of this institution. Associated initially with the names of Davy and Faraday, they have only in these days come to full fruition as the result of the very brilliant elucidation of the real nature of electricity by your distinguished professor of physics, Sir Joseph Thomson. Such an advance, developing slowly and fitfully with long intervals of apparent stagnation, needs to be reviewed from generation to generation, disentangled from the undergrowth that obscures it, and its clear conclusions driven home. This complexity of the chemical elements is a consequence of the condition that neither free electricity nor free matter can be studied alone, except in very special phenomena. Our experimental knowledge of matter in quantity is necessarily confined to the complex of matter and electricity, which constitutes the material world. This applies even to the free elements of the chemist, which in reality are no more free then than they are in their compounds. The difference is merely that whereas in the latter the elements are combined with other elements, in the so-called free state they are combined with electricity. I shall touch but briefly on this first aspect, as in principle it is now fairly well understood. But its consistent and detailed application to the study of chemical character is still lacking.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
The Complexity of the Chemical Elements 1 . Nature 99, 414–418 (1917). https://doi.org/10.1038/099414a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/099414a0