ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1870s, while engaged in investigations of paranormal phenomena, the radiometer effect, and the movement of radiant matter in evacuated vessels, Crookes produced weekly editorials in Chemical News on a variety of contemporary issues. Chief among these were the questions of the professionalization of chemists and their education, and who exactly was eligible to be a Fellow of the Chemical Society.2 He penned two long editorials on the state of English scientific education when the recommendations of the Devonshire Commission on Scientific Instruction were published in 1875.3 These make it clear that Crookes belonged to the party of scientific naturalism that saw scientific knowledge as the norm of truth. He argued that undergraduates should be allowed to specialize ‘in the different branches of science, physics, chemistry, or biology’ provided they first had a good grounding in the principal branches of knowledge.4 That was a grounding he felt the new secular board schools were failing to provide, as is clear from an anecdote he sent to a correspondent:
The annual meetings of British Association also continued to provide him with good copy. When he attended the meeting at Bradford in September 1873 he heard Alexander Williamson’s presidential address defending the atomic theory. This led Crookes to pen an anonymous skit in Chemical News in which he tried to distinguish between the original atomism of Leucippus and that of Dalton 2,000 years later.6 Crookes’ essay caused some controversy, leading him to raise the question of what would happen if Dalton’s atoms were split? He suggested that we might then appeal to Thomas Graham’s speculation (based upon the behaviour of gases) that there was only one kind of matter and that different elements depended upon the speeds with which atoms moved. We should then have ‘a chemistry beneath our chemistry’. But the ‘beneath’ was only speculation; chemists could only work on the basis of experiment. The exchange is interesting only in revealing that while engaged in his radiometric work Crookes was thinking deeply about the constitution of matter and the possibility of a Proutian chemistry lurking behind the veil of Daltonian chemistry.7
