The points of our gold pens are
tipped with an osmium-iridium alloy. It is a pity that this family of
noble metals is so restricted, for they are unsurpassed in tenacity and
incorruptibility. They could be of great service to the world in war and
peace. As the "Bad Child" says in his "Book of Beasts":
I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones, his hide is sure to flatten 'em.
Along in the latter half of the last century chemists had begun to
perceive certain regularities and relationships among the various
elements, so they conceived the idea that some sort of a pigeon-hole
scheme might be devised in which the elements could be filed away in the
order of their atomic weights so that one could see just how a certain
element, known or unknown, would behave from merely observing its
position in the series. Mendeleef, a Russian chemist, devised the most
ingenious of such systems called the "periodic law" and gave proof that
there was something in his theory by predicting the properties of three
metallic elements, then unknown but for which his arrangement showed
three empty pigeon-holes.
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