by Primo Levi
Another nineteenth-century chemist, this one French, purified this “spirit of wood,” described its properties, and noticed that it closely resembled the old and well-known “spirits of wine”: its aroma and taste were even more agreeable than “spirits of wine,” but, when consumed even in small quantities, it resulted in permanent blindness, a confirmation that a pleasant odor can be a terrible guide. It was probably with the assistance of some colleague who was a classicist that he clumsily translated “spirit of wood” into “methy hyle,” because in ancient Greek hyle means wood, and methy generically indicates intoxicating liquids (wine, hydromel, and so on). This “methy” also appears in the ancient name of amethyst: not because of its purplish color but because it was believed that this gem had the property of combating drunkenness.
From “methy hyle” was derived “methyl alcohol,” and from that methane, which is a close chemical neighbor, gets its name, in accordance with a first rudimentary agreement among the chemists of various nations that called for the -ane ending to be assigned to saturated hydrocarbons. Methane was followed by ethane, from the root of “ether”; propane, through a slight distortion of the Greek protos, that is, “first”; and butane, from the root of butyros, which in turn comes from a Greek word that means cow’s-milk ricotta. The other saturated hydrocarbons, pentane, hexane, heptane, and so on, were baptized somewhat less fancifully, relying on the Greek numerals that corresponded to the respective number of carbon atoms.
A second chemical language, less imaginative but more expressive, is that of the so-called rough formulas. To say that common table sugar is C12H22O11, or that the old compound Pyramidon, a favorite of family doctors, is C13H17ON3, tells us nothing about the origin or use of the two substances, but it does give us an inventory of their contents. It is, in fact, a rough, incomplete language: it tells you that in order to construct a molecule of Pyramidon, you need thirteen carbon atoms, seventeen hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom, and three nitrogen atoms, but it says nothing about the order and the structure in which those atoms are bound together. In other words, it’s more or less as if a typesetter pulled the letters c, e, s, t, l, and a out of his type case and claimed to express the word “castle”: an uninitiated reader, or one who has no assistance from the context, could just as easily read “cleats” or who knows what other anagram. It’s a summary form of writing, and it has only one benefit (typographical in nature): it fits nicely on a line of printed text.
The third language has all the advantages, and its only disadvantage is due to the fact that its “words” don’t fit into the lines of conventional printing. It tends (or attempts) to give us a portrait, an image of the minuscule molecular edifice: it renounces most of the symbolism that is an intrinsic element of any language, regressing to the level of illustration or pictography. It’s as if, instead of the word “castle,” we were to print or sketch a picture of a castle. This system brings to mind the professor from the land of Balnibarbi whom Swift describes in Gulliver’s Travels: according to him, it was possible to abolish all words whatsoever and reason without them, and in place of words he suggested that men should carry with them “such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on,” that is, what is nowadays known as the “referent”: a ring if the subject is rings, a cow if the subject is cows, and so forth. In this way, the professor argued, “it would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations.” There is no doubt that the objective, or rather, object-based language of Balnibarbi and the structural formulas of chemists come close to perfection in terms of comprehensibility and internationalism, but they both also have the shortcoming of bulkiness and inconvenience, as the unhappy typesetters of organic chemistry textbooks know all too well.
Of course, the language of structural formulas, despite its ambitions to portraiture, and in contrast with Balnibarbish, has remained partially symbolic by the very fact of being a genuine language. In the first place, because its depictions are not life-size but drawn on the “scale” (that is, the enormous enlargement) of roughly one to a hundred million. Second, because instead of the shapes of atoms they contain a graphic symbol for them, that is, an abbreviation of their name, and because it has proved useful to insert between the atoms themselves the forces that hold them together, represented with symbolic lines.
And, last of all, for the fundamental reason, which applies to all portraits, that the object depicted, generally speaking, possesses depth, a three-dimensional structure, while a portrait remains flat because the page on which it must be printed is flat. And yet, in spite of all these limitations, if we compare these conventional diagrams with the “real,” quasi-photographic portraits that subtle techniques have made possible over the past few decades, we find the resemblance striking: the molecules-as-words, the little sketches derived from reasoning and experimentation, are truly quite similar to the ultimate particles of matter that the atomists of antiquity guessed at when they glimpsed specks of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight.
The Language of Chemists II
When I was a working chemist, I suffered from heat, cold, and fear, and never would I have expected, after leaving my longtime profession, to feel any nostalgia. And yet it happens in my free moments, when the mechanism slips into neutral, like an engine idling: it happens, thanks to the singular power of filtration peculiar to memory, which lets happy recollections survive and slowly suffocates the others. Recently I happened to see an old fellow prisoner, and we talked about the kinds of things veterans talk about; our wives noticed, and pointed out to us, that in two hours of conversation we hadn’t brought up a single painful memory, but only the rare moments of remission, or the odd episodes.
I have before me a chart of the chemical elements, the “periodic table,” and I feel nostalgia, as if I were looking at a class picture, with the boys wearing bow ties and the girls the modest black tunic: “each by each, I know you all.”1 The stories of the struggles, defeats, and victories that bind me to certain elements I have already recounted in another setting; likewise, the stories of their character, virtues, vices, and eccentricities. But now my trade is a different one, it is a trade of words, selected, weighed, carefully, patiently fitted together; and so, to my mind, the elements now tend to become words, and, instead of the thing, what interests me deeply is the name of the thing and the reason for its name. The landscape is another, but as varied as the landscape of the things themselves.
Everyone knows that the “self-respecting” elements, the ones that exist in nature both on Earth and among the stars, are ninety-two in number, ranging from hydrogen to uranium (actually, this last has lost a little of its reputation in recent decades). Now, their names, passed in review, constitute a picturesque mosaic that extends over time from the distant prehistoric era to the present day, and in that mosaic it is perhaps possible to glimpse all the languages and civilizations of the Western world: our mysterious Indo-European forefathers, ancient Egypt, the Greek of the ancient Greeks, the Greek of the Hellenists, the Arabic of the alchemists, the nationalistic pride of the nineteenth century, all the way up to the deeply suspect internationalism of the postwar years.
Let us begin the review with two of the best known and least exotic elements, nitrogen and sodium. Their international symbols, that is, the single letter or pair of letters used to abbreviate the conventional and original name, are respectively N and Na, the initials of nitrogenium and natrium, and here we can glimpse traces of an ancient misunderstanding. Nitrogenium means “born of niter,” and natrium means “the substance of natron”; now, originally, in the language of ancient Egypt, niter and natron were the same thing.
In the complicated written form of that language, it was considered superfluous to indicate vowels (perhaps because chiseling words into rock is harder work than using a ballpoint pen, and skipping vowels spared the stonecutters work), and the three consonants NTR generically indicated saline efflorescences: both the kind found on old walls, wh
ich in Italian is still called salnitro, and in other languages, more expressively, “salt of rock,” or saltpeter (from Greek petra), and the one that the Egyptians excavated from certain deposits and used in mummification. The latter is made up mostly of soda, that is, sodium carbonate, while saltpeter is made up of nitrogen, oxygen, and potassium.
In other words, they were both “non-salt salts,” substances with a saline appearance, water-soluble, colorless, but differing in taste from table salt; and glassmakers quickly understood that in the production of glass one could be substituted for the other without any major differences in the final product (which is easy enough for us to understand: at the temperatures attained in a glassmaker’s crucible, both salts break down, the acid portion goes away, and all that remains in the fused mass is the metal oxide). The Greeks and, later, the ancient Romans, in the transliteration of Egyptian writings, inserted vowels on a completely arbitrary basis, and only thereafter was the “nitro” variant specialized to indicate niter, the father of nitrogen, while “natro” was used to indicate soda, the mother of sodium.
For that matter, nitrogen, a substance that is chemically fairly inert, lies at the center of age-old disputes over nomenclature. Dubbed “azote” almost two centuries ago by a French chemist with a dubious Grecism (“without life”), it is instead, as I have said, “born of niter” (nitrogen) to the English and “the suffocant” (Stickstoff) to the Germans. There is no agreement even about the symbol: the French, who claim credit for its discovery, until recently rejected the symbol N and instead used Az (some still use it, just to make a point).
If you run down a list of the names of minerals, you are confronted with a veritable orgy of proper names. One has the impression that no mineralogist has ever been satisfied to conclude his career without lending his name to a mineral, with the addition of the -ite ending as the laurel wreath: garnierite, senarmontite, and thousands more.
Chemists have always been more discreet; in my review, I have come upon only two names of elements that the discoverers chose to dedicate to themselves, and they are gadolinium (discovered by the Finnish chemist Gadolin) and gallium. The latter has a curious story behind it. It was isolated in 1875 by the French chemist Lecocq de Boisbaudran; “cocq” (nowadays it is written “coq”) is French for “rooster,” or “gallus” in Latin, and Lecocq named his element gallium. A few years later, in the same mineral that the French chemist had examined, the German chemist Winkler discovered a new element; those were years of serious tension between Germany and France, and the German believed that the name gallium was a nationalistic tribute to Gaul, and so he named his element germanium in order to even the score.
Aside from these two, only a few of the brand-new and highly unstable elements that are heavier than uranium, obtained by man in tiny amounts from nuclear reactors and enormous particle accelerators, have been given personal names; specifically, they have been dedicated to Mendeleyev, Einstein, Madame Curie, Alfred Nobel, and Enrico Fermi.
More than a third of all elements have been given names that refer to their most evident properties, via linguistic paths that are more or less intricate. Thus chlorine, iodine, and chromium, from Greek words that mean, respectively, “green,” “violet,” and “color,” and refer to the colors of the salts or vapors (or, in other cases, the stripes of their emission spectrum). Thus barium is the “heavy one,” phosphorus is the “light-bearer,” and bromine and osmium are both, with varying nuances, the “stinkers” (but what chemist deserving of the name could ever confuse the two extremely unpleasant odors?).
Also in this spirit, which I might call descriptive, and which bespeaks modesty and common sense, hydrogen and oxygen were given names that mean, respectively, “water-begotten” and “acid-begotten”; but because their baptism was the work of the French chemist Lavoisier (or at least confirmed by him), the chemists of Germany rejected it, and overlaid those names with two crude translations: Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff, or, respectively, “water substance” and “acid substance,” and the Russians followed suit, coining the pair vodorod and kislorod.
Only three of the elements that have been given “descriptive” names show signs of a leap of imagination: dysprosium (“hard to get at”), lanthanum (“hidden”), and tantalum. With the third name in that list, the discoverer (Ekeberg, in 1802: he was Swedish, a neutral, and so the name he chose wasn’t tampered with) meant to make reference to Tantalus, the mythical sinner described in the Odyssey: he is immersed in water up to his neck, but is eternally racked with thirst, because every time he bends over to drink the water retreats, leaving only arid ground. He, the pioneering chemist, suffered the same pangs during the alternating hopes and disappointments along the path that finally led to the recognition of his element.
Apart from the aforesaid germanium, twenty or so elements were given names that more or less clearly refer to the country or city in which they were discovered: lutetium after the old name for Paris, scandium from Scandinavia, holmium from Stockholm, rhenium from the Rhine. Alongside these geographic celebrities we should mention the obscure village of Ytterby, Sweden, because near there a mineral was found that proved to contain a number of previously unknown elements. The mineral was called Ytterbite, and from various segments of that name, by a procedure reminiscent of that used in the word puzzles called “logogriphs,” ytterbium, yttrium, terbium, and erbium were successively coined.
I have deliberately left aside the history of the names of the veteran elements, well-known to one and all, characterized and exploited by the earliest and most ancient civilizations thousands of years before the birth of the first chemist: iron, gold, silver, copper, sulfur, and many others. It is a complicated and fascinating story, which perhaps deserves to be told separately.
1. From the poem “L’Aquilone” (“The Kite”) by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912).
Butterflies
The building, now (1981) undergoing renovation, that once housed Turin’s great hospital, the Ospedale Maggiore di San Giovanni Battista, is not a cheerful place. Its ancient walls and soaring vaults seem to be steeped in generations of suffering; busts of its benefactors, which line the stairways, look down on the visitor with the unseeing gaze of mummies. But when you reach the crociera, or cross vault, where the two central halls meet, and the exhibition of butterflies assembled there by the Museo Regionale di Storia Naturale (Turin Museum of Natural History), your heart swells, and you feel that you have regressed to the fleeting but giddy condition of a student on a field trip. As from any well-designed exhibition, or, indeed, from the consumption of any spiritual nourishment, you emerge well fed and, at the same time, hungrier than before.
If we were to imagine a zoologist who knew all about birds and mammals but nothing about insects, and we were to tell him that there are hundreds of thousands of animal species, of great diversity, that have devised a method of building themselves a shell using a unique derivative of glucose and ammonia; that when these little animals have grown to the point that they “no longer fit in their skin,” or rather, in their unexpandable shell, they discard it and grow another, larger one; that, in the course of their brief lifetimes, they transform themselves, taking on shapes that differ as radically as does a hare from a pike; that they run, fly, leap, and swim, and have managed to adapt themselves to practically every environment on Earth; that with brains weighing no more than a fraction of a milligram they have succeeded in amassing the skills of the weaver, the potter, the miner, the murderer with his poisons, the trapper, and the wet nurse; that they are able to live on any organic substance, living or dead, including those synthesized by humans; and that some of them live in exceedingly complex societies, and engage in such practices as the preservation of foods, birth control, slavery, alliances, wars, agriculture, and breeding livestock—well, this unlikely zoologist would refuse to believe it. He would tell us that this insect-model of animal is something straight out of science fiction, but that if such a thing really existed it would be a terrible rival
to man, and in the long run would certainly vanquish him.
In the insect world, butterflies enjoy a privileged status: anyone who goes to an exhibition of butterflies will understand that a comparable show devoted to such orders as the Diptera or the Hymenoptera, even one of equal scientific importance, would be less popular. Why? Because butterflies are beautiful, but that’s not the only reason.
Why are butterflies beautiful? Certainly not, as Darwin’s adversaries insisted, to give pleasure to humans: butterflies existed at least a hundred million years before the first human being. I believe that our very concept of beauty, which is necessarily relative and cultural, has been modeled over the centuries on butterflies, as well as on stars, mountains, and the sea. Proof of this can be had by examining a butterfly’s head under the microscope: for most observers, admiration gives way to horror and disgust. In the absence of cultural habit, we are disconcerted by this new object; the enormous eyes without pupils, the hornlike antennae, the monstrous buccal apparatus all appear to us as a diabolical mask, a twisted parody of the human face.
In our civilization (but not in all civilizations) bright colors and symmetry are considered “beautiful,” and so butterflies are pretty. Now, a butterfly is a veritable factory of colors: it transforms both the food it consumes and the wastes it excretes into dazzling pigments. What’s more, it is able to obtain its magnificent metallic and iridescent effects by purely physical means, exploiting nothing more than the interference effects we see in soap bubbles and in the oily films that float on the surface of water.
But the fascination of butterflies is not merely a product of color and symmetry: deeper factors contribute as well. We wouldn’t find them so beautiful if they weren’t able to fly, or if they flew as straight and alertly as bees, or if they could sting, or, especially, if they didn’t pass through the unsettling mystery of metamorphosis. This latter phenomenon takes on, to our eyes, the value of a poorly deciphered message, a symbol, and a sign. It’s no surprise that a poet like Guido Gozzano (“friend to the chrysalises”) should have studied and loved butterflies so passionately: if anything, it’s surprising that so few poets have loved them, since the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis, and from chrysalis to butterfly, casts a long and admonitory shadow.