The meetings of the Royal Society during the past week
have brought the properties orradium into prominence. We discuss elsewhere Sir William Ramsay's interesting specula- tions on the transmutation of metals, but we may here call attention to a statement of Sir Oliver Lodge to an interviewer, in which he makes a remarkable deduction from the dis- covery. "Just as plant and animal life is traceable in the ultimate analysis to a single form, so all known materials are but collections in different numbers and groups of one single particle or unit, which seems likely to be nothing else than the infinitely small particle of electricity which is called an electron." Different forms of lifeless matter would therefore seem to have been deduced from a single origin. It is impossible not to be impressed with the resemblance of this, the latest theory of modern science, to the conclusions of some of the pre-Socratic philosophers. The atomist Democritus would have agreed with Sir Oliver Lodge, just as Heraclitus would have seen his flax in the incessant motion of radium. It is a truism in the history of science that the beginner may by a kind of spiritual intuition reach a conclusion which it Is reserved for generations of experimentalists laboriously to verify.
Previous page
