John A. R. Newlands

Abstract

WE regret to have to record the death of Mr. John Newlands, as a consequence of an attack of influenza, at the comparatively early age of sixty-one. While probably no subject in the whole range of theoretical chemistry has received a greater amount of attention than the numerical relations among the atomic weights of the elements, few among the younger generations of chemists are acquainted with the circumstances attending the establishment of the remarkable generalisation usually known as the “Periodic Law.” The contemporaries of Newlands, however, and all who have taken the trouble to look into the literature of the subject, know that it was he who discovered the fundamental relation embodied in this so-called law, and that he clearly expressed the connection between atomic weight and properties about five years before any publication of their views either by Mendeléef or Lothar Meyer. Fortunately the facts stand out from the records clearly enough, but it is difficult now, after a lapse of more than thirty years, to explain-the indifference of the chemical world to an observation so remarkable as that to which Newlands drew attention first in the Chemical News, August 1864, again more fully in the same journal, August 1865, and a third time more emphatically in a communication to the Chemical Society, March 9, 1866. For many years previously the subject had been, so to speak, in the air.. Numerous papers by Dumas, Gladstone, and latterly by Odling, had appeared in which various arrangements of the atomic weights had been adopted, but none of a comprehensive kind; yet when a scheme which consisted not of a number of isolated groups, but which supplied a system; covering the whole of the known elements, was brought forward, all that the Chemical Society could do was to-reject it with ridicule and contempt, and to decline to-print a word of the new doctrine in. the then scanty pages of its Journal. The unsettled state of opinion in reference to the numerical values of many atomic weights can be the only excuse for what seems like stupidity and prejudice, for Newlands' arrangement required the adoption of the atomic weights standardised as recommended by Cannizzaro in 1864-66, and these values were still unknown to, or ignored by many chemists.