Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A system of inorganic chemistry / by William Ramsay. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![the Creation it was necessary to speculate on the nature of matter. The various aspects of matter which we see around us were sup- posed by Empedocles (492 b.c), and later by Aristotle (384 B.C.), to be raodiBcations of one fundamental original material, occurring in various forms, the difference between which, was caused by the assumptiou of certain elements, or as we should now name them properties. This original material was imagined by Empedocles to consist of small particles, which he termed atoms, or indi- visibles, because they were in bis view the ultimate particles into which matter could be divided. Plato imagined sucb atoms to have the form of triangles of different sizes, equilateral, isosceles, or scalene ; and ascribed the perfection or imperfection' of matter to be due to the form of its ultimate particles. But such particles were modified by the elements earth, water, air, and fire; that is, tbey assumed a solid, liquid, aeriform, or flaming nature, according to tbe element which predominated in them. Along with this view, a certain confusion of thought arose which led to the conception that earth, water, air, and fire were actually present in, and constituents of, matter, and that all the elements originated in one, supposed by Thales (600 B.C.) to be water, and by Anaximenes (about 550 b.c.) to be air or fire. The well- known poem of Lucretius, Be rerum naturd, is a transcript of th ese views of the atomic constitution of the universe. But such speculations were wholly without a basis of fact, and led to no new knowledge, These ideas, in all probability, were originally derived from India, where the four elements already men- tioned were associated with a fifth and sixth, ether and .consciousness, as appears from the teaching of Buddha. The notion that matter was one in kind, modified by certain attributes, developed the belief that by changing the attributes, the matter itself would be transmuted. Thus Timseus is made to say by Plato:—In the first place, that which we are now calling water, when congealed, becomes stone and earth, as our sight seems to show us [here he refers probably to rock-crystal, a transparent, hard material, which was supposed to be petrified ice] ; and this same element, when melted and dispersed, passes into vapour and fire. Air again, when burnt up, becomes fire, and again fire, when condensed and extinguished, passes once more into the form of air ; and once more air, when collected and condensed, produces cloud and vapour; and from these, when still more compressed, comes flowing water ; and from water come earth and stones once more ; and thus generation seems to be transmitted from one to the other m a circle. Here the elements are evidently conceived in their B 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21980068_0023.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
