Many discoveries are lost through laziness, a fact of which we are well aware; or if every soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack (as Napoleon thought), few soldiers take the trouble to unpack their kits. The atmosphere had been" investigated "for centuries, so that by 1890 surely we knew all about it; at that time Lord Rayleigh was determining with the greatest possible accuracy the densities of the common gases-oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. A waste of time. So most people would have thought then, even scientists and practical men : surely the properties of those gases were known accurately enough! But Rayleigh found out that nitrogen, prepared from ammonia, was lighter than " atmospheric nitrogen " by one-half per centum. The atmospheric nitrogen was " dry air minus oxygen," and at that time was thought to be a homogeneous substance and identical with chemically prepared nitrogen. Clearly, however, it was not! Then Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Ramsay proved that atmospheric nitrogen contained an inert gas, heavier than pure nitrogen, and this gas they called argon (argos, inactive, idle). Argon, indeed, constitutes one per centum of the atmosphere.
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