TRANSMUTATION-ANCIENT AND MODERN 107 Unfortunately it is not yet possible to supplement these simple recipes for the artificial production of gold with the necessary instructions as to how an atom is to be caused to expel an a- or a B-particle at will, unless Nature has decreed that it should do so of itself, in which case nothing known will prevent it. But, if man ever achieves this further control over Nature, it is quite certain that the last thing he would want to do would be to turn lead or mercury into gold-for the sake of gold. The energy that would be liberated, if the control of these sub-atomic processes were as possible as is the control of ordinary chemical changes, such as combustion, would far exceed in importance and value the gold. Rather it would pay to transmute gold into silver or some base metal. War, unless in the meantime man had found a better use for the gifts of science, would not be the lingering agony it is to-day. Any selected section of the world, or the whole of it if necessary, could be depopulated with a swiftness and dispatch that would leave nothing to be desired. Indeed in the whole tragic history of the past few years nothing has been perhaps more illuminating than the attitude of the world and its rulers to science. The intellectual aspect of the discoveries here briefly enumerated—the discovery of radioactivity, the realisation that it was due to a natural transmutation of the elements, the laborious tracing out, step by step, of the complicated sequence of changes, the discovery of the law connecting these changes with the Periodic Table, the first real understanding as to what constitutes the difference between one element and another, the vista that opens out should man ever exercise over these higher order of natural energy the control he has so effectively assumed over the lower interesting perhaps, but what is the use of it all? There is a rumour, puffed judiciously in the press, that radium is a cure for cancer, and immediately there is a change. Stock exchanges get up radium, wild-cat mining schemes are floated, the public are invited to get rich quickly, and every quack and charlatan, with his radium ointment, radium pills, and radium waters, refurbishes his familiar propaganda. The charitable and benevolent, to whom the cry of suffering and the dying ever make its irresistible appeal, raise the funds to buy the radium. The genuine scientific investigator can no longer afford to, and goes without. Again the scene changes and the country is spending nearly £100 every second on the war. Radium, like every other gift of science, is pressed into the service of the war, as it is convenient for illuminating the dials of watches and scientific instruments at night, and the State, which before as regards anything productive or creative did not exist, must now afford anything for the purpose of destruction. Men, materials, and capital must be conscripted and organised to the last point for the purposes of occasional international strife. But there is a struggle which is world-wide and never-ending, the struggle against external nature for control and mastery. The millions take no part in it, are hardly aware that it goes on, and would be surprised if they were told that their future fate and prosperity depended upon it rather more intimately than upon the issue of the doughty conflicts of the parliamentarians some of them send up to Westminster. Neither, again, would the mere alteration in the character of their education, making it scientific rather than classical, alone bring them salvation. For this struggle is by duel rather than by armies, and the issue of the duel the millions accept as blindly THE MODERN DUEL 109 Enormous and dumbly as a decree of Providence. tracts of the British Empire are uninhabitable by white men by reason of malaria and yellow fever. It is the will of Allah. A solitary duellist1 against the unknown and not understood confronted Nature. A single intelligence in the teeth of official apathy and neglect sought the "million murdering cause, and found it. In India alone more than a million people died yearly from malaria before its cause and remedy were ascertained. The Panama Canal owes its successful construction to the work of this solitary individual in Bangalore, diligently followed up by others. Praise be to Allah! The future of the British Empire is at the moment in the hands of five million stalwart men, with an organised nation of workers and vast accumulations of wealth and resources and every possible scientific discovery and invention behind to back them up. If the nation thinks, when peace returns, that the struggle against Nature, which after all is of more abiding and permanent interest to its destiny, large as the present contest looms to-day, can be best carried on in the old way by a handful of isolated individuals as a sort of hobby in their spare time, out of their own means, and in the intervals of more urgent professional duties, the nation is mad. [The war being now over, it is not out of place to add that an even greater danger than neglect awaits the scientific investigator, the danger that he along with every other creative element in the community will be remorselessly shackled and exploited to bolster up the present discredited social system. There is abundant evidence since the war that science rules the world, and he who would aspire to rule it must first rule science. The prospect of creative science under the heel of government depart1 Sir Ronald Ross. Q ments ruled by lawyers, politicians, financiers and administrators of the modern official type is a prospect as appalling as the handing over of civilisation to the Hun. But in the modern world the community somehow must contrive to rule through its creative elements, rather than to allow the non-creative elements to rule the creative. Everything comes back to the unsolved problem of how to purify and strengthen the moral and ethical standards of the official classes, which have been so sadly perverted by their peculiar system of education, in order to make them conform more nearly to the standards of conduct and honesty entertained by the majority of ordinary respectable and benevolent people.] THE CONCEPTION OF THE CHEMICAL ELEMENT AS ENLARGED BY THE THE Council of the Chemical Society have honoured me with the invitation to deliver one of three lectures bearing on the ultimate constitution of matter, and I accepted the invitation in my desire to show how greatly I appreciated it rather than with any prospect of being enabled, when the time came, to say anything on the subject which has not already been said before. The problem of the ultimate constitution of matter belongs to another world than that through which for the past four years we have been living, and although hostilities have at length ceased, and we may look forward to an opportunity of resuming in the future the thread of our philosophical investigations, philosophy herself is not so easily to be resumed. Novel in one sense as are the ideas introduced into the concepts of physics and chemistry by the study of radioactivity, four years' interruption has made them appear rather as a remote historical accomplishment than as a contemporaneous development. Although no longer new, however, the more as the subject matures does it become apparent that these advances are of fundamental and increasing importance to the chemist. One would perhaps have expected that on the 1 A Lecture delivered before the London Chemical Society on 19th December 1918. |