Long and thorny was the path of the discoverers of new elements, like a path through a thicket which keeps losing itself among narrow crevices. Next to it ran another path, a beaten track. But the latter was the track of false suns, of false discoveries of chemical elements. And oh, the number of queer things and paradoxes encountered on this track! The Kosman case was literally a drop in the ocean.

   The Englishman Crookes isolated from yttrium a host of new simple substances which he called meta-elements. Actually they were simply mixtures of long known elements.

   Swienne, a German scientist, sought the transuranium elements in samples of that was thought to be cosmic dust collected among the glaciers of Greenland by the famous polar explorer Nordenskjold. And he hurried to report that he had succeeded in finding an element with the atomic number 108 in the dust.

   The truth was not long in striking back. The ill-starred scientist had simply been under the illusion of an incorrect theoretical idea.

   One cannot help recalling the Englishman Freehand who organized a special expedition to Palestine to "fish" for traces of elements No. 85 and No.87 in the lifeless waters of the Dead Sea. Or the American Allison who, while scientists puzzled over the question why no heavy analogues of iodine and cesium could be found on Earth suddenly began discovering them everywhere. He detected them in all solutions and minerals checked by a new method he had worked out. The method turned out to be faulty. The analysis greatly fatigued the operator's eyes and caused illusions.

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