The Romance of Modern Chemistry

CHAPTER IX NATURAL WATERS, AND WHAT THEY MAY CONTAIN IT was a commonly-accepted idea among the ancients that fire, air, earth, and water were the four elements, the simplest forms which matter could assume. This conclusion was not reached as the result of experi- ments, of unsuccessful attempts to get at something more simple; for the ancient philosophers never made any chemical experiments at all. So far as they con- cerned themselves with the science, they were what we might call “study-table chemists,” and they thought it a much finer thing to make theories than to make experiments. To indulge in the latter practice was re- garded as an occupation quite below the level of a philosopher. Now all this has changed, and in the last two centuries men have used the experimental method with infinite skill and patience to wring from Nature many of her most valuable secrets. Amongst other things, it has been discovered that water is not an element, as the ancients thought, but is capable of being broken down into yet simpler and more elemen- tary substances, hydrogen and oxygen. So far, then, the ancients were wrong, but at the same time they were correct in regarding water as one of the first- rank substances in Nature, not only because it is so