look down upon its surface. Were we in it,
like fish, it would be as invisible to our eyes as
air is; although distant objects would be tinged
with blue or green, as distant mountains are
with purple; and the depths would present a
tinted ground, just as the depths of the sky
present a ground of blue.

Water is fluid, and also humid or moist.
There is no need to take offence at the statement
that water is wet; for Aristotle calls it a humid
element. Mercury is fluid without being wet;
and unmixed oil can hardly be called damp or
moist.

Pure water is scentless, and theoretically
tasteless; but is any water to be found which
is absolutely without flavour, incapable of
making any impression on the palate, except
those of cold and heat? It would be difficult
to find an utterly tasteless spring, so readily does
water take to itself foreign elements, in lesser or
greater quantity. The purest, that distilled
from snow, is far from being agreeable or the
healthiest beverage. Boerhaave states his
conviction that nobody ever saw a drop of quite
pure water. When water is sufficiently charged
with foreign matters—gases, salts, or metallic
compounds—to exert an appreciable action on
the animal economy, it is called mineral water.
In this sense, the sea is a mass of mineral water.
Many mineral springs issue from the earth at
diverse localities. Mineral rain, even, has fell;
smelling offensively of bad eggs and brimstone,
being condensed from the vapours of
sulphureous springs.

There is also a striking contrast between the
clearness of water and its weight, some of the
heaviest waters being the clearest. To look
down into the Lakes of Geneva or Lucerne at
the ends of exit, or into the seas which skirt
some of the rocky coasts of Scotland, or of the
Mediterranean, you would say that it was only
air a little more dense than usual and rendered
fluid; while bathing or rowing, you almost
seem to be suspended in space. Water ought,
you think, to be as light as it is transparent.
Opaqueness conveys the notion of weight,
translucency of the opposite quality. Yet water,
even the freshest and sweetest, is seriously
heavy. To be convinced of the fact practically,
fetch a few pailsful from the neighbouring well,
or sustain the shock of a well-directed douche,
or even submit yourself to the fall of a shower-
bath. The waves of a rough sea are battering-
rams which, by their mere weight, dash men
down as if they were insects. The heaviness
of water has, naturally and properly, caused it
to be selected as the standard of weight in the
Metrical System. A cubic centimetre of
distilled water at the temperature of its greatest
density, that is to say, at thirty-nine degrees
Fahrenheit, gives the gramme, of which all other
weights are either multiples or fractions. Reason
tells us that water must be heavy indeed, to allow
really heavy bodies to float upon it; but it looks
light. Mud, certainly, does not look light, but
looks heavier than it really is.

The specific gravity of water is represented
by unity, or one. It serves as the measure for
determining that of other bodies, as that of air
does for that of other gases. Owing to the
contraction of cold, water is about one-sixtieth
heavier in winter, than in summer. The specific
gravity of water being one, that of gold is
nineteen and a half nearly. How heavy gold is,
no one can realise who has not had an
opportunity of handling it in quantity—in bullion,
coin, or plate.

Water is eight hundred and fifty times
heavier than air. The height of a column of
water which shall be equal in weight to that of
a column of the atmosphere of the same
diameter, might be ascertained by filling a long
glass tube (say thirty-six feet long), closed at
one end, with water, in a lake, and then setting
it upright with its open end just immersed in
the lake. The column of water inside the tube
will be found to descend to a height of about
thirty-three feet above the point of the tube's
immersion in the lake, according to the state of
the atmosphere, leaving a vacuum at the top of
the tube. The precise height of the column
would vary with the weather, exactly as the
height of the mercury in the barometer varies,
and would equally indicate coming changes.
Its unwieldiness is the only reason why a water
barometer, with its foot immersed in a marble
basin, should not be an article of furniture in
every mansion three stories high. Running
upstairs to read its height on the scale, would
be merely a pleasant exercise. This equilibrium
between the atmospheric pressure and a column
of water thirty-three feet high, is the reason
why that elevation is the limit to which sucking
pumps will raise water.

The claims of water to be considered an element
were founded on the belief that it is diffused
everywhere, and present in all places where
there is matter; that there is not a body in all
nature which will not yield water. Water is
the medium in which a multitude of organised
beings pass either the whole or a portion of
their lives; it serves as drink indispensable for
men and for animals who people the earth and
the air; it produces fat or embonpoint, and is
really nutritive, since it prolongs the existence
of unhappy wretches who are deprived of every
other aliment; it is one of the most requisite
agents of vegetation; its presence, brought
about artificially, makes the desert fertile, and
triples the produce of cultivated lands. In
water, are formed a number of mineral
substances which man afterwards applies to his own
purposes. Water is the most useful chemical
agent in the majority of reactions and organic
changes. Without water, few combinations of
matter are possible, whence the old precept
"Corpora non agunt nisi sint soluta,"
"undissolved bodies are inert and inactive." Without
moisture, the seed could not germinate, nor the
seedling sprout, nor the stem spread, nor the
blossom open. Water cooks our food, and
helps to digest it, and to distribute the nutritive
results throughout our frame. In the absence
of water, cleanliness, in its multifarious forms