We thought we knew phosphorus. We warm
a portion of it sealed in an empty tube, for about a week. It has become
a brown infusible substance, which does not shine in the dark nor oxidate
in the air. We heat it to 500 F., and it becomes common phosphorus again.
We transmute sulphur in the same singular way. Nature, you know, gives
us carbon in the shape of coal and in that of the diamond. It is easy to
call these changes by the name allotropism, but not the less do they
confound our hasty generalizations.
These facts of allotropism have some corollaries connected with them
rather startling to us of the nineteenth century. There may be other
transmutations possible besides those of phosphorus and sulphur. When Dr.
Prout, in 1840, talked about azote and carbon being "formed" in the
living system, it was looked upon as one of those freaks of fancy to
which philosophers, like other men, are subject. But when Professor
Faraday, in 1851, says, at a meeting of the British Association, that
"his hopes are in the direction of proving that bodies called simple were
really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are
masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"--when he comes
forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and
means, if his life is spared, to try them again,--how can we be surprised
at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a
gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion of his own
making?
And so with reference to the law of combinations.
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