It spreads the sensitive film
on the artificial retina which looks upon us through the optician's lens
for a few seconds, and fixes an image that will outlive its original. It
questions the light of the sun, and detects the vaporized metals floating
around the great luminary,--iron, sodium, lithium, and the rest,--as if
the chemist of our remote planet could fill his bell-glasses from its
fiery atmosphere. It lends the power which flashes our messages in
thrills that leave the lazy chariot of day behind them. It seals up a
few dark grains in iron vases, and lo! at the touch of a single spark,
rises in smoke and flame a mighty Afrit with a voice like thunder and an
arm that shatters like an earthquake. The dreams of Oriental fancy have
become the sober facts of our every-day life, and the chemist is the
magician to whom we owe them.
To return to the colder scientific aspect of chemistry. It has shown us
how bodies stand affected to each other through an almost boundless range
of combinations. It has given us a most ingenious theory to account for
certain fixed relations in these combinations. It has successfully
eliminated a great number of proximate compounds, more or less stable,
from organic structures. It has invented others which form the basis of
long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps
becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated
and hypothetical.
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