Protyle

Chemical Name L-asperaginyl-L-erginyl-L-velyl-L-tyrosyl-L-valyl-L-histidyl-L-protyl-L-phenylalanine... 

From the first meeting of the Alchemical Society, recent theories in atomic chemistry and physics immediately entered the discussions. Redgrove s paper, mentioned above, brought up the subject. Walter Gorn Old raised Crookes s theory of the protyle as an essentially alchemical notion. Sijil Abdul -Ali discussed the resemblance of properties of the Philosopher s Stone to those of the ether (Journal of the Alchemical Society. 1913a, 15-16). The early... 

Secondly, there is ether, the sole vehicle in space for the transmission of energy, and the medium which, so to speak, unites energy with matter. Thirdly, there are the ultimate atoms which, prior to their condensation into matter, we have called the protyles, and which within the elementary atom become electrons and positive electricity. 

The connection between First Matter and the protyles is obvious. It remains for me to deal with the concept of the Four Elements. These are often thought to denote the hot, cold, moist and dry principles or qualities of bodies but we may also suppose that the elements, earth, water, air, and fire, represent respectively the solid, liquid, gaseous, and what may be called incandescent-gaseous states of matter, although this is by no means a satisfactory or complete interpretation. It must be confessed that the subject of the elements is a difficult one, and I have not yet found explanations for it in the language of modem science. (1913, 43-44)... 

For example, she quotes Crookes s assertions of vitalism at the chemical level as an antidote to the heat-death of the universe that seemed to be entailed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (1888, 1 603), or second-hand accounts of his lectures on the protyle, with assertions of its similarity to thinking in the Bhagavad Gita (1 681). 

Brock, William H. 1985. From Protyle to Proton William Prout and the Nature of Matter, 1785-1985. Bristol and Boston Adam Hilger. 

Lockyer s studies of the solar spectrum revealed to him that the sun is a miasma of chemical elements. Where did they come from In 1873 Lockyer developed the theory, later expounded in his Chemistry of the Sun (1887), that in the hottest (blue-white) stars the stellar matter is broken apart into the constituents of atoms themselves subatomieparticles, the protyle discussed by Dumas. Then, as the stars cooled, these particles combined to form regular elements - including some, like helium, not (then) known on Earth. 

This theory was presented in the journal Nature, which Lockyer founded, in 1914. But by that time, what atoms were made of and whether they were divisible and transmutable were questions accessible to experiments on Earth. These experiments showed that the enthusiasts of protyle - Prout, Dumas, Lockyer - had hit on a kind of truth. 

W. H. Brock, From Protyle to Proton, Hilger, Bristol, 1985. 

Brock WH (1985) From protyle to proton, William Front and the nature of matter 1785-1985, Adam Hilger, Bristol... 

In 1815 and 1816 William Prout (1785-1850) published two papers in which he asserted that the densities of gases were simple whole-number multiples of hydrogen. This was only a decade after Dalton first postulated atomic weights, and there were considerable uncertainties in experiments and formulas. Nonetheless, the concept was an attractive one since it implied the possibility of a simplest primary material out of which all other atoms were composed. Prout postulated the existence of this protyle from which all other atoms would be composed. It had an almost religious simplicity. In 1819, Berzelius published a... 

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