John B. Gough declares that a few kind words spoken to him, in a crisis of his life, saved him from ruin. He afterward carefully educated the orphan daughters of the gentleman who uttered those words.
“Why,” you say, “it was a little thing.” “Yes, little for him, but a big thing for me.”
CRYSTALS OF ALUM.
The importance of many things depends upon the point of observation. To a hypothetical astronomer on a distant star, this world would be too minute for observation. In that shining pathway of the heavens, called the “milky way,” there have been discovered eighteen millions of stars, each hundreds of times larger than our earth; yet our atom in immensity is, just now, of marvelous interest to us. Indeed, it must be of interest to the highest intelligences, for such are the harmonies of God’s universe that the minutest planet is in many of its forces and laws representative of the whole. So that our world is, in a sense, both a microcosm and a cosmo.
Let us briefly consider some characteristics of the earth, from the standpoint of the chemist.
All substances have been divided into two great classes, the inorganic and organic. The latter contains two subdivisions—the vegetable and animal world. Nature thus comprises three great sub-kingdoms, the mineral, vegetable and animal.
A mineral is an inorganic body (that is, one in which no parts are formed for special purposes), possessed of a definite chemical composition, and usually of a regular geometric form. It may seem at first glance that the last part of this definition is not correct, but there is reason to believe that all mineral substances may, under favorable circumstances, assume crystalline forms. Water and air are minerals. Other liquids and gases are included in the term, but as we have had already something to say of these latter substances, we shall, for the purposes of this article, use the word earth in the popular sense; namely, inorganic matter, which at ordinary temperature is solid. All materials are classified into
ELEMENTS AND COMPOUNDS.
By an element is meant a substance which has never been resolved into parts, and conversely, one that can not be produced by the union of two or more substances. There is some difference of opinion as to their number. It is usually given as sixty-four. There are a great many compounds. Nature seems to delight in surprising us by the simplicity of the means employed in producing marvelous results. As the mind of Milton combined the twenty-six letters of our alphabet to form “Paradise Lost,” so the Infinite arranged and re-arranged the elements to form the sublime poem of creation. Fifty-one of the elements are metals, and thirteen metalloids; gold is a familiar example of the former, and sulphur of the latter. A few, like hydrogen and oxygen, are gases; two are liquids; quicksilver and bromine: the greater number exist as solids. But few of them are found native, i. e., chemically uncombined with other substances. In the fierce heat of former ages they were mixed as in a mighty crucible, and few escaped the power of affinities thus engendered. Gold and copper are sometimes found pure, but even they, more frequently than otherwise, exist fused with other substances.