The Periodic Table Read Online Free PDF Page B

Enrico that what was written there was actually taking place. Enrico didn’t seem too convinced, but by now it was dark and we were half frozen; we washed our hands, bought some slices of chestnut pudding and went home, leaving the electrolysis to continue on its own.
    The next day we still had access. In pliant obsequiousness to theory, the cathode jar was almost full of gas; the anode jar was half full: I brought this to Enrico’s attention, giving myself as much importance as I could, and trying to awaken the suspicion that, I won’t say electrolysis, but its application as the confirmation of the law of definite proportions, was my invention, the fruit of patient experiments conducted secretly in my room. But Enrico was in a bad mood and doubted everything. “Who says that it’s actually hydrogen and oxygen?” he said to me rudely. “And what if there’s chlorine? Didn’t you put in salt?”
    The objection struck me as insulting: How did Enrico dare to doubt my statement? I was the theoretician, only I: he, although the proprietor of the lab (to a certain degree, and then only at second hand), indeed, precisely because he was in a position to boast of other qualities, should have abstained from criticism. “Now we shall see,” I said: I carefully lifted the cathode jar and, holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher), and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic symbol, the glass ring of the bottom.
    We left, discussing what had occurred. My legs were shaking a bit; I experienced retrospective fear and at the same time a kind of foolish pride, at having confirmed a hypothesis and having unleashed a force of nature. It was indeed hydrogen, therefore: the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensation the universes are formed in eternal silence.

Z INC
    For five months we had attended, packed together like sardines and full of reverence, Professor P. ‘s classes in General and Inorganic Chemistry, carrying away from them varied sensations, but all of them exciting and new. No, P. ‘s chemistry was not the motor-force of the Universe, nor the key to the Truth: P. was a skeptical, ironic old man, the enemy of all forms of rhetoric (for this reason, and only for this, he was an anti-Fascist), intelligent, obstinate, and quick-witted with a sad sort of wit.
    His students handed down stories of his examinations conducted with ferocious coldness and ostentatious prejudice: his favorite victims were women in general, and then nuns, priests, and all those who appeared before him “dressed like soldiers.” On his account were whispered murky legends of maniacal stinginess in running the Chemical Institute and his personal laboratory: that he conserved in the basements innumerable boxes of used matches, which he forbade the beadles to throw away; and that the mysterious minarets of the Institute itself, which even now confer on that section of the Corso Massimo d’Azeglio a jejune tone of fake exoticism, had been built at his bidding, in his remote youth, in order to celebrate there each year a foul and secret orgy of salvage. During it all the past year’s rags and filter papers were burnt, and he personally analyzed the ashes with beggarly patience to extract from them all the valuable elements (and perhaps even less valuable) in a kind of ritual palingenesis which only Caselli, his faithful technician-beadle, was authorized to attend. It was also said that he had spent his entire academic career demolishing a certain theory of stereo-chemistry, not with experiments but with publications. The experiments were performed by someone else, his great rival, in some unknown part of the world; as he proceeded, the reports appeared in the Helvetica Chemica Acta, and Professor P. tore them apart one by one.
    I could not swear to the