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They gain knowledge enough to reckon with the hired man, to keep the tally of the marketing, to compute interest, and to do parish business. What more do they want? Your college-men will talk about selections and temperatures, silex and fluorine; but what has all that to do with planting the ten-acre lot? Timothy and red-top grew before Liebig was born.

In point of fact, it has been found that at the temperature of liquid hydrogen practically all chemical activity is abolished, the unruly fluorine making the only exception. The explanation hinges on the fact that every atom, of any kind, has power to unite with only a limited number of other atoms.

Carbon will combine with hydrogen, but will drop it if it can get oxygen. Oxygen will combine with iron or lead or sodium, but cannot be made to combine with fluorine. No more than two atoms of oxygen can be made to unite with one carbon atom, nor more than one hydrogen with one chlorine atom.

The radiations thus emitted are several times reflected on fluorine or on quartz, as the case may be; and as, in proximity to the bands, the absorption is of the order of that of metallic bodies for luminous rays, we no longer meet in the pencil several times reflected or in the rays remaining after this kind of filtration, with any but radiations of great wave-length.

The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the clouds were green-gray. No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, of Niflheim. To have done so would have been instant death; the air was a mixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallic fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric acid.

Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252° below zero centigrade, and a solid at 264°. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210° below zero centigrade. In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks, all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are the result of more or less heat.

But if truth, pure, abstract, and free from anything of a mythical nature, is always to remain unattainable by us all, philosophers included, it might be compared to fluorine, which cannot be presented by itself alone, but only when combined with other stuffs.

For this purpose the radiant source used was a strip of platinum covered with fluorine or powdered quartz, which emits numerous radiations close to two bands of linear absorption in the absorption spectra of fluorine and quartz, one of which is situated in the infra-red.

"It will still be from the Solar System." "I think we should be more broadminded," said Arcot. "We aren't going to stay in this system not even in this galaxy. We might call it the Galaxian." "Did you say broadminded?" asked Wade. "Let's really be broad and call it the Universite or something like that. Or, better yet, call it Fluorine!

By means of improved machinery and of ingenious devices for shielding the substance operated on from the accession of heat, to which reference will be made more in detail presently, Professor Dewar was able to liquefy the gas fluorine, recently isolated by Moussan, and the recently discovered gas helium in 1897.