ean much for the development of modern science.
Speculations and experiments with regard to the philosopher's stone
and the transmutation of metals are supposed to fill up all the
interests of the alchemists of those days. As a matter of fact,
however, men were making original observations of very {46} profound
significance, and these were considered so valuable by their
contemporaries that, though printing had not yet been invented, even
the immense labor involved in copying large folio volumes by hand did
not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men
and thus preserving them for future generations, until the
printing-press came to perpetuate them.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed
foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the
influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical
theories by the discovery of radium and the radio-active elements
generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time
chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific
and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was
considered so absurd. The idea that it would be impossible under any
circumstances to convert one element into another belongs entirely to
the nineteenth century. Even so distinguished a mind as that of
Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to
acknowledge the modern supposition of the absurdity of metallic
transformation, but, on the contrary, believed very firmly in this as
a basic chemical principle and confessed that it might be expected to
occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connexion
with metallic copper, and had concluded that this was a manifestation
of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the
other.

{47}

With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that
indeed all the so-called radio-activities of the very heavy metals are
probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work,
the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject for
amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to
admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something
over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working
hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and form taught for so many
centuries by the scholastic philosophers which proclaimed that all