and appliances, becomes next to impracticable;
domestic economy is brought to a standstill;
and the arts are compelled to make a sudden
stop. The druggist can dispense no more
medicines, and dissolution itself is impossible—
not only of bodies after death, but of alkalis,
salts, sugars, gums, whose intimate combinations
with water obtained for it the title of
universal solvent.

Hence arose the ancient dogma that Water
is the elemental matter, or stamen, which
suffices alone for the production of all things.
Thales, Milesius, and others imagined that all
things were made of water. Before the
discovery of its real composition, it was seen that
it could be resolved into vapour, and the vapour
again condensed into water; and was naturally
regarded as a simple principle common to a
great number of composite bodies. The fact
that water cannot be really decomposed by heat
alone, was not then known; that is, it was not
suspected that agents differing from heat were
capable of decomposing water.

The range between freezing and boiling
water has been divided by the French into
one hundred degrees, whence the scale is called
centigrade. Under certain peculiar
circumstances, the range is extensible. The change
from a liquid to a solid state, may be retarded
by keeping the vessel which contains the water
in perfect repose. Guy Lussac kept water,
completely deprived of air, perfectly liquid down
to –twelve degrees. But in this case, the
slightest shock, the least agitation, suffices to
make the whole mass congeal.

The boiling of water may also be delayed by
dissolving in it any solid body less volatile than
itself, such as common salt, when eleven degrees
or twelve degrees higher of Fahrenheit are
required to produce ebullition. This is why plunging
fish into boiling salt and water renders it
firmer, by suddenly coagulating the albumen.
The greater heat so obtained also cooks
vegetables more thoroughly. The same hot liquid
is also best for poaching eggs: they come out
of their bath with smooth and clean, instead of
ragged and untidy, jackets.

Thus the limits between which water can
exist, as water, are strikingly narrow and
restricted—only one hundred degrees centigrade
under ordinary circumstances. The human frame
can bear a wider range of temperature than this
delicate, unorganised, inanimate " element."
Colder than the freezing-point, water is ice;
hotter than the boiling-point, water is steam.
But not long since, the Comte Henri Russel,
after encountering fifty degrees of cold in Asiatic
Siberia—and mercury freezes at forty-eight
degrees—had to bear fifty degrees of heat in
Australia. When we remember that water
evaporates rapidly at a temperature far below the
boiling-point, we see at once what a transitory,
fleeting, changeful thing it is. While we are
looking at it, it is gone; before we can seize it,
it slips through our fingers. Indeed, according
to Boyle and others, water is a crystal melting at
a low temperature, whose normal condition is that
of ice; in other words, water is an unnatural
state of ice; whenever it is not, it ought to be ice.
Heat dissolves ice into water, just as it dissolves
butter into oil. Butter and ice, nevertheless,
are the proper forms for those liquids to
appear in.

But what a ruthless piece of philosophy is
this, to solidify all our streams with a stroke of
the pen! And how happy, how thankful ought
we to be that we live neither in a world of
steam nor a world of ice! Circumstances might
render such a life possible, but it would require
very extraordinary circumstances to render it
tolerably comfortable.

Pure water is protoxide of hydrogen. It is
hydrogen rusted, and that thoroughly and
completely, as much as iron-rust is oxide of iron;
only the rusting is done instantaneously instead
of gradually. Here again we have two separate
paradoxes in one. Firstly, hydrogen is the
lightest form of matter known, except the
ether—which we don't know. Two volumes of
this lightest gas combined with one volume of
oxygen, a gas only a trifle heavier than air,
form a fluid whose weight we have just been
wondering at. Secondly, oxygen is eminently
the sustainer of combustion, the life and soul of
fire; and hydrogen is the combustible which
illuminates our cities, warms our apartments,
cooks our food, and kills us by its ill-timed
explosions. And yet these two together
constitute the agent which we daily employ, on the
smallest and the largest scale, to extinguish
fire! Verily, there are more things in heaven and
earth than were dreamt of, in Shakespeare's
days, in his philosophy.

When the scornful mother launched the taunt
at her son, " That he never would set the
Thames on fire," and the lad muttered,
candlestick in hand, " I'm blessed if I don't try!" he
was more in the right than his prejudiced
parent. The Thames may be set on fire—
although not with a tallow-candle—and burnt.
It is a question, not of possibility, but of purse-
strings. Water can be separated into its two
constituent gases (which is an analytical proof
of what it is made), and the hydrogen used for
lighting purposes. An experimental apparatus
has been worked at the Invalides, Paris, and is
working still; but the problem of producing
gas from water, at a marketable price, yet
remains unsolved. The process and its
attendant essays, are not open to public
inspection; for voracious plagiarists and patentees
would pounce upon cheap water-gas the
moment it was invented.

An early suspicion of the true nature of water
was entertained by Newton. The genius who
deduced gravity from the fall of an apple, saw
the way to a grand chemical discovery in the
sparkling of a dewdrop. We know that the
brilliancy of the diamond is caused by its strong
refractive power, which is out of proportion to
its density; we also know that diamond is
carbon, combustible. Water also refracts the
sunbeams to a degree exceeding that which
corresponds to its density. A new or an artificial