Read The Periodic Table for Free Online Page A

working for lawyers and notaries, and salesmen. These people, to a greater or lesser degree, tend to transfuse the human substance of their chief into their own mold, as occurs with pseudomorphic crystals: sometimes they suffer from it, often they enjoy it, and they possess two distinct patterns of behavior, depending on whether they act on their own or “in the exercise of their function.” It often happens that the personality of their chief invades them so completely as to disturb their normal human contacts and so they remain celibate: celibacy is in fact prescribed and accepted in the monastic state, which entails precisely the proximity and subjection to the highest authority. Caselli was a modest, taciturn man, in whose sad but proud eyes could be read:
    —he is a great scientist, and as his “famulus” I also am a little great;
    —I, though humble, know things that he does not know;
    —I know him better than he knows himself; I foresee his acts;
    —I have power over him; I defend and protect him;
    —I can say bad things about him because I love him; that is not granted to you;
    —his principles are right, but he applies them laxly, and “once upon a time it was not like this.” If I weren’t here... and in fact, Caselli ran the Institute with a parsimony and hatred of novelty even greater than P. ‘s.
    The first day it was my fate to be assigned the preparation of zinc sulfate: it should not have been too difficult; it was a matter of making an elementary stoichiometric calculation and attacking the zinc particles with previously diluted sulfuric acid: concentrate, crystallize, dry with the pump, wash and recrystallize. Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is gray and its salts are colorless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal. It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are still surrounded with the glamour of their discovery.
    Caselli handed me my zinc; I returned to the bench and prepared to work: I felt curious, shy, and vaguely annoyed, as when you reach thirteen and must go to the temple to recite in Hebrew the Bar Mitzvah prayer before the rabbi; the moment, desired and somewhat feared, had come. The hour of the appointment with Matter, the Spirit’s great antagonist, had struck: hyle, which, strangely, can be found embalmed in the endings of alkyl radicals: methyl, butyl, etc.
    There was no need to get from Caselli the other raw material, the partner of zinc, that is, sulfuric acid: it was there in abundance in every corner. Concentrated, of course: and you had to dilute it with water; but watch out! it is written in all the treatises, one must operate in reverse, that is, pour the acid in the water and not the other way around, otherwise that innocuous-looking oil is prone to wild rages: this is known even to the kids in liceo. Then you put the zinc in the diluted acid.
    The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them,