万物简史 第132期:基本物质(4)
英语课
Although chemistry had come a long way in the century that separated Newton and Boyle from Scheele and Priestley and Henry Cavendish, it still had a long way to go. Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley's case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine 1 acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion 2. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious elan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.
从牛顿和玻义耳，到金勒、普里斯特利和亨利·卡文迪许，中间隔着一个世纪。在这个世纪里，化学得到了长足的发展，但还有很长的路要走。直到18世纪的最后几年（就普里斯特利而言，还要晚一点），各地的科学家们还在寻找——有时候认为真的已经发现——完全不存在的东西：变质的气体、没有燃素的海洋酸、福禄考、氧化钙石灰、水陆气味，尤其是燃素。当时，燃素被认为是燃烧的原动力。他们认为，在这一切的中间，还存在一种神秘的生命力，即能赋予无生命物体生命的力。
No one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt 3 of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein ) and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry: organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic 4 (for those that did not).
谁也不知道这种难以捉摸的东西在哪里，但有两点是可信的：其一，你可以用电把它激活（玛丽·谢利在她的小说《弗兰肯斯泰因》里充分利用了这种认识）；其二，它存在于某种物质，而不存在于别的物质。这就是化学最后分成两大部分的原因：有机的（指被认为有那种东西的物质）和无机的（指被认为没有那种东西的物质）。
adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵
- Marine creatures are those which live in the sea. 海洋生物是生存在海里的生物。
- When the war broke out,he volunteered for the Marine Corps.战争爆发时，他自愿参加了海军陆战队。
n.燃烧；氧化；骚动
- We might be tempted to think of combustion.我们也许会联想到氧化。
- The smoke formed by their combustion is negligible.由它燃烧所生成的烟是可忽略的。
v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸
- We were worried that one tiny jolt could worsen her injuries.我们担心稍微颠簸一下就可能会使她的伤势恶化。
- They were working frantically in the fear that an aftershock would jolt the house again.他们拼命地干着，担心余震可能会使房子再次受到震动。
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