A full copy of this paper would be much appreciated.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/93028
\”On Scandium\” by Sir William Crookes, 1908.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.
I\’ve read bits and pieces of this. Would like to read the whole thing though.
From what I\’ve read so far it holds up remarkably well.
And the New Year may well find me traipsing around the area where he got his scandium from. Looking for scandium, of course.
Update, this paper has been sent to me, thank you v much Andrew!
This might be the whole thing in unformatted text:
http://www.archive.org/stream/philosophicaltr209royauoft/philosophicaltr209royauoft_djvu.txt
All Royal Society journal articles over 70 years old are available free from the Royal Society’s website. The pdf is at http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/80/541/516.full.pdf+html?sid=b7a952c8-f585-4c56-8823-4a3b936dcb57
Ah, that was the day – when an article in a major scientific journal was only 3 pages long.
Interesting also that “scandium” seems to be declined, appearing sometimes as “scandia”.
But if it’s following Latin, I can’t find anything that would have both an -um and an -a ending, except in the plural. I thought perhaps he was using it to refer to a group of compounds, but he starts the article “scandia is”.
Any classicist geologists who can help?
The “-a” ending replacing “-um” was a term for the oxide of the element in question. I think “Erbia” and “Yttria” also appear in the paper. Tim will know if that usage persists. I think “Alumina” is still used for its oxide. Latin would seem to have nothing to do with it.
Tim adds: Spot on. We can get more complex too: zircon is the sand, the mineral, zirconium the metal and zirconia the oxide.