Abstract
THE subject on which I have the honour to address you this evening is, I am aware, one of the most hackneyed among the topics that have served for popular scientific lectures. I can only hope that it has not quite lost its charm. The chemist is often twitted with having to deal with mere dead soulless things, which at the best only set themselves into angular and unpalpitating crystals. There may be a certain amount of truth in this, but in flames we surely have phenomena of some liveliness. Our flame must be fed; it has its anatomy and varied symmetry; it is vigorous, mobile, and fleeting. I do not wish to make extravagant claims, but I do think that one may be excused for feeling almost as much interest in the study of flame as, for example, in the contemplation of the somewhat torpid evolutions of an amoeba or the circulation of water in a sponge. To our guileless ancestors, at any rate, flame was a phenomenon of the rarest mystery; unable as they were to discriminate between the material and the immaterial, unable to track the solid or liquid fuel to its gaseous end, this radiant nothingness called flame became to them one of the primary inscrutable, irresolvable things of Nature—an all-devouring element, often of peculiarly divine significance.
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Flame1. Nature 49, 86–92 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/049086a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/049086a0