ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he

even put it upon record that he had somedoubt about the purity

of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination

was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was

treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'

and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his

experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen

(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and

indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of

the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped

unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his

procedure.

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to

the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was

still rather a procession ofhappy accidents than an orderly

conquest of nature?

Yet thespirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the

world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere

handful whogrew up tofeel wonder and curiosity about the

secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at

the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the

limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in

Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all

about the world.

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be

called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of

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