The causes and course of organic evolution : a study of bioenergics / by John Muirhead Macfarlane.

  • John Muirhead Macfarlane
Date:
1918
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The causes and course of organic evolution : a study of bioenergics / by John Muirhead Macfarlane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it has been proved that at least some of the so-called material elements can be further split up, and so transformed into sim¬ pler elements. Thus the metal uranium gradually changes into ionium, and later into radium, while it again can be changed into helium. But experiment and atomic weight alike suggest strongly that the scarce element polonium becomes transformed into helium and likewise into lead. Furthermore, since it has been found that the characteristics of all of the so-called ele¬ ments can be expressed in terms of their atomic weight, this would suggest that possibly a continuous and definite relation exists between all of the elements. Accordingly, some physi¬ cists from Prout’s time (1815) onward have regarded hydrogen —with atomic weight 1—as the sole element, from which, by increasingly complex unions and transfers of energy, the other now known 82 elements have resulted. In reaching this conclusion, however, physicists have been almost insensibly carried another step backward, so as to suggest that the world—and possibly all sidereal space—is the arena for only two primitive and primeval entities, ether and energy. The former consists of highly elastic particles, absolutely inert in themselves, but when charged with definite amounts of energy they have properties conferred on them that have caused us in the past to name them ultimate atoms, of which hydrogen might be regarded as the simplest. But the development of electro-chemistry has introduced a still more fundamental conception as to the ultimate material unit. From the researches of J. J, Thomson and of Larmor (o, 6) it has been shown that even the unit-element hydrogen, as well as others of higher atomic weight, when rendered incan¬ descent, gives off extremely minute negatively electrified “cor¬ puscles” or electrons. The radius of each of these is about the 100,000 part of that of a hydrogen atom, and its mass about the i^o part. So it may be said that the ultimate physical unit is the electron or corpuscle, that is immensely smaller than the hydrogen atom. This probably has an inert but elastic ether core or center, and carries around it a charge of negative electricity. When brought in contact with a body
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