On the Incubation Period of Scientific Links

Abstract

THE length of the dormant period during which a certain class of scientific discoveries has to remain unrecognised before they are made available is a subject that may form an interesting chapter in the history of science. I will cite one or two examples, in one of which I am personally interested, as illustrating my meaning, particularly as I think they will enable me to point out the cause of this strange anomaly at a time when so much attention is being given to original research, and yet which will leave the results of original research to lie dormant for years after they have been realised. As illustrating the fact that most important laws may remain for many years dormant, I have but to cite the law of Avogadro, which remained unnoticed for fifty years, until the investigations of Dumas proved it to be a most important aid in chemical research. The law of Dulong and Petit on the connection between the specific heat and the atomic weight of the elements had to pass through a dormant period of more than twenty years before it was resuscitated by the experiments of Regnault. More than forty years ago I announced a new law connecting the physiological reactions of inorganic substances with their isomorphous relations. This law, although founded on an extensive series of experiments, and since verified by the investigation of the action of the compounds of more than forty of the elements, has up to the present time remained entirely dormant, not having been noticed, as far as I am aware, by any writer on physiology. A French chemist, M. Rabuteau, has recently very cavalierly consigned it aux baggages du passé, apparently under the idea that it is a revival of the hypothesis that connected the action of poisons with the more or less acute angles of their crystals. Now, however, the important part played by these inorganic substances as physiological reagents is beginning to be recognised (see Ringer, Journal of Physiology, January and August, 1883; Brunton and Cash, Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxxv.).