On Dr. Johnstone Stoney's logarithmic law of atomic weights

In the year 1888 Dr. G. Johnstone Stoney communicated to the Society a memoir with title nearly as above, which, however, was not published in full. At the request of the author, who attaches great importance to the memoir, I have recently, by permission of the Council, consulted the original manuscript in the archives of the Society, and I propose to give some extracts, accompanied by a few remarks. The author commenced by plotting the atomic weights of the elements taken as ordinates against a series of natural numbers as abscissæ. But a curve traced through the points thus determined was found to be “one which has not been studied by mathematicians.”