its products. Is it probable
that means should be more numerous where a lesser number of results are
produced?

"'My master's opinion was that these fifty-three primary bodies have
one originating principle, acted upon in the past by some force the
knowledge of which has perished to-day, but which human genius ought to
rediscover. Well, then, suppose that this force does live and act again;
we have chemical unity. Organic and inorganic nature would apparently
then rest on four essential principles,--in fact, if we could decompose
nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but
three. This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the
ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to
scorn. Modern chemistry is nothing more than that. It is much, and yet
little,--much, because the science has never recoiled before difficulty;
little, in comparison with what remains to be done. Chance has served
her well, my noble Science! Is not that tear of crystallized pure
carbon, the diamond, seemingly the last substance possible to create?
The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore
creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond. Yet we have
discovered the nature and the law of its composition.

"'As for me,' he continued, 'I have gone farther still. An experiment
proved to me that the mysterious Ternary, which has occupied the human
mind from time immemorial, will not be found by physical analyses, which
lack direction to a fixed point. I will relate, in the first place, the
experiment itself.

"'Sow cress-seed (to take one among the many substances of organic
nature) in flour of brimstone (to take another simple substance).
Sprinkle the seed with distilled water, that no unknown element may
reach the product of the germination. The seed germinates, and sprouts
from a known environment, and feeds only on elements known by analysis.
Cut off the stalks from time to time, till you get a sufficient quantity
to produce after burning them enough ashes for the experiment. Well,
by analyzing those ashes, you will obtain silicic acid, aluminium,
phosphate and carbonate of lime, carbonate of magnesia, the sulphate and
carbonate of potassium, and oxide of iron, precisely as if the cress
had grown in ordinary earth, beside a brook. Now, those elements did not
exist in the brimstone, a simple substance which served for soil to the
cress, nor in the distill