Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE WHITHERWARD OF MATTER "... melted into air, into thin air: . . . the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. . . ." THE beautiful old words forming the context of this quotation, spoken before Prospero broke his staff and drowned his book, convey to us a belief that is held by many of the great contemporary workers in discovery. It is not that stone and mortar crumble into dust, that "the lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamsyd gloried and drank deep," and many another court and fane besides, it is that the dissolution to which the wizard referred, and which is now being divined anew through the wizardry of science, is a dissolution not of towers and temples, but of the very elements of matter of which they are comprised. It is that copper and gold, sulphur, carbon, and oxygen, and all the eighty-odd elements whose various combinations comprise the visible universe, are belike under the tooth of time, that slowly, inevitably, and altogether independently of us, they seem to be undergoing a progressive degeneration to some condition of Nirvana—"melted into air, into thin air." Our medieval forefathers saw nothing unreasonable in the thought that one element might be changed into another, that silver might be changed into gold or lead into silver; they called it transmutation. Our immediate fathers, however, believed in it not at all. To them the elements of matter were irrefragable, eternal substances; iron was iron, and gold was gold forever and forever. This was not with them.so much a matter of dogmatic statement as of assumption; an assumption, too, that was wholly natural, for it was based on the fact that, do what they would, they could not transmute one element into another; they left out of account the consideration ...