ring wedges of
large industrial processes are introduced. The fact that this
announcement should have been made before the British Association for
the Advancement of Science and by a thoroughly conservative English
chemist, probably settles forever the question of the transmutation of
metals, in the way that the people of the Middle Ages looked at the
problem rather than as the intervening centuries did.

The old medieval thinkers, then, were only ridiculous to a few
generations of nineteenth century scientists who, because they knew a
little more about certain details in science than preceding
generations had done, thought that they knew all that there was to be
known about this immense subject, and made fun of thinkers quite as
great as themselves in preceding centuries. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, instead of making ourselves ludicrous by raising a
laugh at the expense of these fellow students in science of the olden
time, we should rather feel like congratulating them upon the
perspicacity which enabled them to anticipate a great truth with
regard to the relationships of chemical elements, especially the
metals, to each other. The present-day idea of thinking physicists and
chemists is {311} that the seventy odd elements described in our
textbooks on chemistry, are not so many essentially independent forms
of matter, but are rather examples of one kind of material exhibiting
special dynamic energies which it possesses under varying conditions,
as yet not well understood. This was exactly the idea that the old
scholastic philosophers had of the constitution of matter. They said
that matter was composed of two principles, prime matter and form.
When this doctrine of theirs is properly elucidated, it proves to be
an anticipation of what is most modern in the thoughts of twentieth
century physicists. A re-statement of the old-time views would read
not unlike many a contribution to a discussion of this subject at an
annual meeting of the British or American Associations for the
Advancement of Science.

This doctrine of prime matter and form, which the scholastics adopted
and adapted from the Greeks, and especially from Aristotle, cannot
fail to be of interest even to modern scientists. According to it,
prime matter was an indeterminate something which made up the
underlying substratum of all material things. Form was the dynamic
element which entered into the composition of matter and made it
exhibit its