The romance of the human body / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Ronald Campbell Macfie
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The romance of the human body / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/290 page 3
    size, shape, and weight, and which could not be further subdivided or altered. In the course of the chemical researches that led to the conception of such things as elements and atoms, many wonderful things were dis- covered. What could be more wonderful than the discovery that water consisted of two dry gases, and that two dry transparent gases could wed together and make the liquid known as water? What could be more wonderful than the discovery that gold, the hard glittering metal gold, if wedded to chlorine, became a transparent fluid, and that out of the transparent fluid, the hard glittering gold could be again recovered ? What, indeed, could be more wonderful than the general dis- covery, afore-mentioned, that all the millions of objects in the world were made out of seventy or eighty fundamental substances ? i As all the faculties of a powerful mind can utter their voice in language whose elements are reducible to twenty-four letters, so all the forms of Nature, with all the ideas they express, are worked out from a few simple elements having a few simple properties.’ Granite and water, and lava and rubies do not seem to have much in common; but they have elements in common. As .a matter of fact, the most diverse objects are often built out of exactly the same chemical substance or substances. Diamonds, carbon, and coal are, chemically speak- ing, the same substances: they are made of the same element, carbon; and the differences between them are due mainly to differences in the arrange- ment of the atoms of the carbon. Carbon, too, in
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image