ound our hasty generalizations.

These facts of allotropism have some corollaries connected with them
rather startling to us of the nineteenth century. There may be other
transmutations possible besides those of phosphorus and sulphur. When Dr.
Prout, in 1840, talked about azote and carbon being "formed" in the
living system, it was looked upon as one of those freaks of fancy to
which philosophers, like other men, are subject. But when Professor
Faraday, in 1851, says, at a meeting of the British Association, that
"his hopes are in the direction of proving that bodies called simple were
really compounds, and may be formed artificially as soon as we are
masters of the laws influencing their combinations,"--when he comes
forward and says that he has tried experiments at transmutation, and
means, if his life is spared, to try them again,--how can we be surprised
at the popular story of 1861, that Louis Napoleon has established a
gold-factory and is glutting the mints of Europe with bullion of his own
making?

And so with reference to the law of combinations. The old maxim was,
Corpora non agunt nisi soluta. If two substances, a and b, are inclosed
in a glass vessel, c, we do not expect the glass to change them, unless a
or b or the compound a b has the power of dissolving the glass. But if
for a I take oxygen, for b hydrogen, and for c a piece of spongy
platinum, I find the first two combine with the common signs of
combustion and form water, the third in the mean time undergoing no
perceptible change. It has played the part of the unwedded priest, who
marries a pair without taking a fee or having any further relation with
the parties. We call this catalysis, catalytic action, the action of
presence, or by what learned name we choose. Give what name to it we
will, it is a manifestation of power which crosses our established laws
of combination at a very open angle of intersection. I think we may find
an analogy for it in electrical induction, the disturbance of the
equilibrium of the electricity of a body by the approach of a charged
body to it, without interchange of electrical conditions between the two
bodies. But an analogy is not an explanation, and why a few drops of
yeast should change a saccharine mixture to carbonic acid and alcohol,--a
little leaven leavening the whole lump,--not by combining with it, but by
setting a movement at work, we not only cannot explain, but the fact is
such an exception to the recogniz