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which states that the elements with even atomic nurabers are more
abundant in nature than those with odd ones.
Clarke and Washington have based their work primarily
on the composition of the earth's crust. As time passed
it became more and more evident that meteorites were better
objects for the study of the average abundance of the chemical
elements in nature than terrestrial rocks. These studies culminated
in Ctold3chmidt*s (1937) classical paper which served as the
basis of practically all the more recent work in this field.
When in I889 Clarke was looking for periodicities
in the relative abundance of the elements, he expected to find
some connection with the periodic table. With sin increasing
knowledge of the abundances of the elements, the discovery of
isotopes, and the determinations of the isotopic composition of the
elements lar was possible more than 40 years later to detect
certain types of periodicities and it became obvious that these
periods followed different laws than those of the atomic structure
and had nothing to do with the periodic table. It seemed, that
the abundances of the elements and their isotopes reflected
nuclear piroperties and that the matter surrounding us bore signs
of representing the ash of a cosmic nuclear fire in which it was
created,
In 19^8 one of us (H.B.S.) attempted to prove this conclusively.
He showed that there was an empirical and quantitative correlation
of the isotopic composition of an element with its cosmic
abundance which could not be explained in any other way than by