THE ALCHEMIST'S DREAM REALISED.

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Volume 2, Issue 79, 5 April 1879, Page 3

THE ALCHEMIST'S DREAM REALISED.

A Correspondent of the Daily News wr j tea j—Large as have been the drafts of late upon our scientific credulity, there has hardly been ono which makes so heavy a demand on our powers of faitb as is involved by the statement that Mr. Norman Lockyer has realised the alchemist's dream, the transmutation of metals. Strange and incredible as Jthis may appear, there is sufficient evidence of its having been effected to make us at least suspend our judgment and await' the results of further experiments before absolutely refusing to believe. WImJ seems certain is as follows: —On Mondlfy in the presence of a small party of scientific men, Mr. Lockyer, by aid of a powerful voltaic current, volatilised copper within a glass tube in hydrochloric acid and then showed by meaßS<£l6f the spectroscope, that the solution contained no longer copper, but another metal, oalioum, the base of ordinary lime. The experiment was repeated with other metals and with corresponding results. Nickel was thus changed into cobalt, and calcium into strontium. All these bodies, as is well known, have ever been regarded as elementary—that is, incapable of being resolved into any components, or of being changed one into another. It is on this basis that all modern chemistry is founded and. should Mr. Lockyer's discovery bear the test of further trial our entire system of chemistry will require revision. The future possibilities of the discovery it is difficult to limit. The great object of the old alchemists was, of course, to transmute baso metals into gold, and so far as our knowledge goes there is no more reason why copper should not be changed into gold as well as into calcium. The means at present employed are obviously such as to render the process far more costly than any possible results can ho worth; but thin is necessarily the case with most scientific discoveries before they are turned into commercial facts. I am not, of courao, holding Out any probability that such will ever be the base; but an attitude of more incredulity is by no means justifiable in the matter. ' Mr. Lockyer is one of our best living apectroscopists, and no man with a reputation Bush as his would risk the publication of so startling a fact as he ban just announced to

the scientific world wftfcout the very surest grounds. He is known by hi» friends as somewhat sanguine, and he doe* not pretend to be «•>. accomplished chemist; but he was supported yesterday by some of our leading, chemists, all of whom admitted that the results of his experiment* Were inexplicable on any other grounds but those idmiftingnttru' change of one element into another—unless in deed our wholo system df spectrum analysis is •to be upset, the other horn of a very awkward dilemma. He has already made to the Paris Academy of Sciences on the subject, and he is about to read a paper btrfore our own Royal Society, in whfoh we may hope to learn the results of bis latest experiments inalle since the paper was read in Paris. For this full account of his researches ire shall look with no small interest; for since a hundread years ago Priestly discovered oxygen and founded modem chemistry, there has been—there could be—no discovery made which would have such an effect on modem science as that the so called elements were no longer to be considered 1 elemt-clmj.