Pleasant ways in science / by Richard A. Proctor.

  • Richard Anthony Proctor
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pleasant ways in science / by Richard A. Proctor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    reasons for regarding hydrogen as a metallic element, strange though the idea may seem to those who regard hardness, brightness, malleability, ductility, plasticity, and the like, as the characteristic properties of metals, and necessarily fail to comprehend how a gas far rarer, under the same conditions, than the air we breathe, and which cannot possibly be malleable, ductile, or the like, can conceivably be regarded as a metal. But there is in reality no necessary connection between any one of the above properties and the metallic nature; many of the fifty-five metals are wanting in all of these properties; nor is there any reason why, as we have in mercury a metal which at ordinary tempera- tures is a liquid, so we might have in hydrogen a metal which, at all obtainable temperatures, and under all obtain- able conditions of pressure, is gaseous. It was shown by the late Professor Graham (aided in his researches most effectively by Dr. Chandler Roberts) that hydrogen will enter into such combination with the metal palladium that it may be regarded as forming, for the time, with the palla- dium, an alloy; and as alloys can only be regarded as compounds of two or more metals, the inference is that hydrogen is in reality a metallic element. Fourteen only of the elements known to us, or less than a quarter of the total number, were thus found to be present in the sun's constitution; and of these all were metals, if we regard hydrogen as metalhc. Neither gold nor silver shows any trace of its presence, nor can any sign be seen of platinum, lead, and mercury. But, most remarkable of all, and most perplexing, was the absence of all trace of oxygen and nitrogen, two gases which could not be supposed wanting in the substance of the great ruling centre of the planetary system. It might well be believed, indeed, that none of the five metals just named are absent from the sun, and indeed that every one of the forty metals not recognized by the spectroscopic method nevertheless exists in the sun. For according to the nebular hypothesis of the origin of our solar system, the sun might be expected to contain all the