Abstract
NOT every one can entertain the wild and woolly west—it is some feat! Still, I should be better pleased, if, instead of entertaining Prof. Lewis, I had led him to be serious and consider the depth of crime he is guilty of in aspersing the character of hydrogen as he has done. Being subversive of all that chemists have taught, the doctrine he preaches, that it is the analogue of fluorine and can act as an anion and as bigamist, is not one to be put forward in the light and airy manner he adopts—without considering the consequences. If its effect were confined to the Pacific coast, we here might regard such speculation with complacency—following the example of the Professor's countryman, who, during the civil war, expressed his readiness, rather than that it should come to an end to his disadvantage, to see every drop of blood shed from every vein of every one of his wife's relations. When, however, the morals of Cambridge and Oxford suffer, especially when one whom I long sought to train in the ways of righteousness, whose hand and eye work I have always greatly admired, preaches it as gospel in the tabernacles of Belgian, British and French chemists, I feel bound to protest. Men of his type, with an ever waxing clerical diathesis, are dangerous to society, when they begin to imagine and preach heresy—their accolytes tend to take them seriously, not realising that they are but acting the Huck Finn to some distant Tom Sawyer.
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ARMSTRONG, H. Hydrogen as Anion. Nature 118, 13 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118013a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118013a0
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