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The lecturer objected most strongly to the word "atomicity;" he could not conceive of one atom being more atomic than another; he could understand the atomicity of a molecule or the equivalency of an atom, but not the atomicity of an atom; the expression seemed to him complete nonsense.
The atomicity of certain chemical bodies does not inform us as to why one should be a deadly poison and another perfectly innocuous. We regard different bodies as congeries of atoms, but it is a singular fact that of two bodies containing exactly the same elements in the same proportions the one is poisonous and the other harmless. The only difference between them is the atomic arrangement.
It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to cyclonic storms of atomicity; it means that tendencies survive sunburnings, survive all cosmic evolutions and disintegrations.
Some of the chief scientific results of the nineteenth century have been but the gaining of supremacy for hypotheses that were mere forlorn hopes, looked on with general contempt, if at all heeded, when the eighteenth century came to a close witness the doctrines of the great age of the earth, of the immateriality of heat, of the undulatory character of light, of chemical atomicity, of organic evolution.
Pécuchet replied that they were not patients, and, having stated the object of their visit: "We want to understand, in the first place, the higher atomicity." The physician got very red, then blamed them for being desirous to learn chemistry. "I am not denying its importance, you may be sure; but really they are shoving it in everywhere! It exercises a deplorable influence on medicine."
It comes to this: All compounds which you can explain on your views of atomicity are atomic, and all that you cannot thus explain are molecular. Similarly with phosphates, arsenates, etc. In all these compounds it is impossible to lay one's finger on any distinction as regards chemical behavior between the compounds called atomic and those usually called molecular.
Now as to valency or atomicity, accepting the received atomic weights of the elements, it is certain that there are at least four distinct types of hydrogen compounds represented by ClH, OH , NH , CH . The recognition of these types, and their relations to each other as types, was one of the most important and best assured advances made in theoretical chemistry.
But this new chemistry has grown up by the help of hypotheses, such as those of Dalton and of Avogadro, and that singular conception of 'bonds' invented to colligate the facts of 'valency' or 'atomicity, the first of which took some time to make its way; while the second fell into oblivion, for many years after it was propounded, for lack of empirical justification.
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