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Personne au temps de Platon n'eut ose couvrir de son nom une doctrine qui n'eut pas fait place a la theorie des idees; et l'on eut excite les justes moqueries de la Grece, en voulant faire d'Epicure ou de Zenon un disciple de l'Academie. Conflict with error has no weapons other than thought and feeling.

In the course of these studies it became evident to them that the presence of argon alone did not fully account for all the phenomena they observed in handling liquefied air, and in 1898 Professor Ramsay was again able to electrify his audience at the Royal Society by the announcement of the discovery, in pretty rapid succession, of three other elementary substances as constituents of the atmosphere, these three being the ones just referred to krypton, neon, and zenon.

Each whiff of colorless gas in its test-tube interferes with the light passing through it in such a way that when viewed through a prism it gives a spectrum of altogether unique lines, which stamp it as krypton, neon, or zenon as definitely as certain familiar and more tangible properties stamp the liquid which imprisons it as mercury.

Travers, his chief assistant, tell the story of the discovery how they worked more and more eagerly as they found themselves, so to say, on a "warmer scent," following out this clew and that until the right one at last brought the chase to a successful issue. "It was on a Sabbath morning in June, if I remember rightly, when we finally ran zenon down," says Dr.

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?

But your interest will hardly fail to be arrested when Professor Ramsay, indicating one and another of these little tubes, says: "Here you see, or fail to see, all the krypton that has ever been in isolated existence in the world, and here all the neon, and here, again, all the zenon."

You will understand, of course, that krypton, neon, and zenon are the new gases of the atmosphere whose existence no one suspected until Professor Ramsay ferreted them out a few years ago and isolated them. In one sense there should be nothing mysterious about substances that every air-breathing creature on the globe has been imbibing pretty constantly ever since lungs came into fashion.