A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
And now, as we view the radiometer, the scene shifts by yet another
century, and we come out of cloud-land and into our own proper age. We
are at the close of the nineteenth century--no, I forget, we are fairly
entering upon the twentieth. Need I say that these again are troublous
times? Man still wages warfare on his fellow-man as he has done time
out of mind; as he will do--who shall say how long? But meantime, as
of yore, the men of science have kept steadily on their course. But
recently here at the Royal Society were seen the familiar figures of
Darwin and Lyell and Huxley and Tyndall. Nor need we shun any comparison
with the past while the present lists can show such names as Wallace,
Kelvin, Lister, Crookes, Foster, Evans, Rayleigh, Ramsay, and Lock-yer.
What revolutionary advances these names connote! How little did those
great men of the closing decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries know of the momentous truths of organic evolution for which
the names of Darwin and Wallace and Huxley stand! How little did
they know a century ago, despite Hutton's clear prevision, of these
marvellous slow revolutions through which, as Lyell taught us, the
earth's crust had been built up! Not even Jen-ner could foresee a
century ago the revolution in surgery which has been effected in our
generation through the teachings of Lister.
And what did Rumford and Davy know of energy in its various
manifestations as compared with the knowledge of to-day, of Crookes
and Rayleigh and Ramsay and Kelvin? What would Joseph Priestley, the
discoverer of oxygen, and Cavendish, the discoverer of nitrogen,
think could they step into the laboratory of Professor Ramsay and see
test-tubes containing argon and helium and krypton and neon and zenon?
Could they more than vaguely understand the papers contributed in recent
years to the Royal Society, in which Professor Ramsay explains how these
new constituents of the atmosphere are obtained by experiments on liquid
air. "Here," says Professor Ramsay, in effect, in a late paper to the
society, "is the apparatus with which we liquefy hydrogen in order to
separate neon from helium by liquefying the former while the helium
still remains gaseous." Neon, helium, liquid air, liquid hydrogen--these
would seem strange terms to the men who on discovering oxygen and
nitrogen named them "dephlogisticated air" and "phlogisti-cated air"
respectively.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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