Dr. Alfred's Partheil's Paper, Page 5

There has been no success so far in trying to discover numeric regularities in the order of atomic weights, as Ramsay showed in his presentation titled "some observations about the periodic law of the elements" at the conference of scientists in Kassel not long ago. He said: "Let's arbitrarily look at the first period [see table in original text page 470] or also the first group [ditto].

In the first case the differences vary between 1 and 3, in the second between 15.4 and 16.1. In other cases the differences are even negative. The difference between argon and potassium for example is -0.75, between tellurium and iodine probably also -0.75.

If we follow Stoney and imagine the elements represented by spheres and their volume in a proportional to their atomic weights than we can imagine the spheres in a concentric order like the skins of an onion, and their proportions can be made visible through concentric circles. If we now divide these circles into half circles and continue to divide those into octants and then continuously connect the sections, we get a spiral that approximates a logarithmical spiral. This spiral is not smooth but wavelike, and the waves seem to have an approximate regularity. To say it differently: if