Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 189, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1912 — NOTHING IS EVER DESTROYED [ARTICLE]

NOTHING IS EVER DESTROYED

Matter Changes, But Doea Not Cease to Exist—Simple Experiment That Proves Proposition. When a candle burns It is not destroyed. What seems like destruction Is merely change. Any one can prove this for himself by a very simple experiment. Take a glass tube uid fit a cork into each end. Bore some holes in the lower cork, one of them in the middle large enough to hold a candle.' Bend a smaller glass tube to U shape, fill It with small pieces of caustic soda and cork one end. Now connect the two cylinders,by a small glass tube through the corks. Insert the candle through the lower cork and suspend the whole apparatus from one beam of the chemical balance. Weigh it carefully. Connect the free end of the U tube to an aspirator so as to establish a uniform current of air through the tubes. Remove the candle, light it and instantly reinsert it Let it burn down until entirely consumed. Now reweigh the apparatus. You will find that it actually weighs more than it did before the candle was burnt! What had happened? The carbon and hydrogen of which the candle was composed have been separated, have drawn oxygen from the air and combined with it, forming water hnd carbon dioxide or carbonic acid gas. The caustic soda has absorbed the carbon dioxide and made sodium carbonate, and has also caught the water. The extra weight is simply that of the oxygen taken out of the air. This is a practical illustration of the great truth that nothing is ever destroyed. Matter changes, but does not cease to exist St. Thomas Aquinas taught this in the thirteenth century —thus as in so many other ways anticipating modern scientists —and some of the ancient Greek philosophers understood it. It has only been proved experimentally in recent years.