“‘Monsieur,’ he said, ’the parity of these three substances, in appearance so distinct, led me to think that all the productions of nature ought to have a single principle.  The researches of modern chemistry prove the truth of this law in the larger part of natural effects.  Chemistry divides creation into two distinct parts,—­organic nature, and inorganic nature.  Organic nature, comprising as it does all animal and vegetable creations which show an organization more or less perfect,—­or, to be more exact, a greater or lesser motive power, which gives more or less sensibility,—­is, undoubtedly, the more important part of our earth.  Now, analysis has reduced all the products of this nature to four simple substances, namely:  three gases, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, and another simple substance, non-metallic and solid, carbon.  Inorganic nature, on the contrary, so simple, devoid of movement and sensation, denied the power of growth (too hastily accorded to it by Linnaeus), possesses fifty-three simple substances, or elements, whose different combinations make its products.  Is it probable that means should be more numerous where a lesser number of results are produced?

“’My master’s opinion was that these fifty-three primary bodies have one originating principle, acted upon in the past by some force the knowledge of which has perished to-day, but which human genius ought to rediscover.  Well, then, suppose that this force does live and act again; we have chemical unity.  Organic and inorganic nature would apparently then rest on four essential principles,—­in fact, if we could decompose nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but three.  This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to scorn.  Modern chemistry is nothing more than that.  It is much, and yet little,—­much, because the science has never recoiled before difficulty; little, in comparison with what remains to be done.  Chance has served her well, my noble Science!  Is not that tear of crystallized pure carbon, the diamond, seemingly the last substance possible to create?  The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond.  Yet we have discovered the nature and the law of its composition.

“‘As for me,’ he continued, ’I have gone farther still.  An experiment proved to me that the mysterious Ternary, which has occupied the human mind from time immemorial, will not be found by physical analyses, which lack direction to a fixed point.  I will relate, in the first place, the experiment itself.