THE ALCHEMIST'S DREAM REALISED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5364, 25 January 1879, Page 7

THE ALCHEMIST'S DREAM REALISED.

A CORRESPONDENT of the Daily 2veics writes :— as hive been the drafts of lat- upon our scientific credulity, there has hardly been one which makes so heavy a lemnnd on our powers of faith as is involved by th': statement that Mr. Norman Lickver has realiied the alchemist's dream, the 1 ran-mutition of metals. Strange and incre lib e as this may appear, there is sufficient evidence of its having been effected to mike us at least suspend oar judgment and await the remits of furth -r experiments before absolutely refusing to believe. What seems certain is as follows On Monday, in the presence of a small party of scientific meo, Mr. Lockyer, by aid of a powerful voltaic current, volatilised copper within a glass tube, dissolved a deposit formed within the tube iu hydrochloric acid, and then showed hy means of the spectroscope, that the solution contained no longer copper, but another nietal, calcium, the base of ordiuarv 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 beiu« resolved into any components, or of being changed one into another. It is on this bas-'s 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 base metals into gold, and so far as our knowledge goes there is 110 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 be worth; but this is necessarily the case with most scientific discoveries before they are turned into commercial facts. lam not, of course, holding out any probability that such will ever be the case ; butau attitude of mere incredulity is by no means justifiable in the matter. Mr. Lockyer is one of our best living spectrosc 'pists, aud no man with a reputation such as his would risk the publication of so startling a fact as he ha 1 just announced to the scientific world without tin very surest grounds. He is kuown by his friends a3 somewhat sauguiue, and he does not pretend to be an accomplished chemist; but he was supported yesterday by some of our leiding chemists, all of whom admitted that the results of his experiments were inexplicable or any other grounds but those admitting of the change of oue element into another—unless indeed our whole system of spectrum analysis is to be tips it, the other horn of a very awkward dilemma. He has already made a communication to the Paris Academy of Scitnces 011 the subject, and he is about to read a paper before our own Koyal Society, in which we may hope to learn the results of his latest experiments tna-le since the paper was read in faris. For this full account of his researches we shall look with no small interest; for since a hundre I years ago Priestly discovered oxygen aud founded modern chemistry, there has been—there could be—no discovery mi-de which would have such an cllect 011 modern science as that the so called elements were no longer to be considered elementary.