of her illegitimate offspring, by the advancement
of those who are pure blood. One of
Lavoisier's most remarkable prophecies was
that, in the mineral substances designated by
the common names of earths and alkalies,
veritable metals exist. Guided by the
piercing foresight of his genius, the illustrious
founder of modern chemistry asserted that
the fixed alkalies and the earths hitherto
known by the designations of lime, magnesia,
alumina, barytes, strontian, and so on, are
nothing else than the oxides or rusts of
special metals. Twenty years afterwards,
Sir Humphry Davy, by submitting these
compounds to the analysis of the voltaic pile,
justified Lavoisier's prediction. By the
decomposing action of the electric fluid, he
separated the metal and the oxygen which
had constituted, by their union, the alkalies
and the earths. Treating potash and soda
thus, he isolated their radical metals, potassium
and sodium; and, shortly afterwards,
by operating on barytes, strontian, and lime,
he obtained from those earths their radical
metals. But, in consequence of the feeble
conducting power of the terreous compounds,
other earthy bases defied him to reduce them;
and, amongst them, alumina.

Davy's startling discovery of the strange
stores which he found hidden in odd corners
of Nature's cupboard, are well remembered;
and it required no marvellous acuteness to
surmise that one short-lived man had not
entirely completed the examination of the
stock in hand. That many of his new metals
were unstable equilibriums under the ordinary
influence of the air and the weather, is
nothing; the properties and affinities of no
one metal are any rule for what shall be the
properties and affinities of another. One
modern metal, platina, has proved eminently
and usefully stable. Since Davy's time,
however, the crop of planets overhead has been
more plentiful than that of metals
underground. Many chemists—amongst others,
Berzelius and Oërsted—failed to extend their
conquests in the same direction; and, for
twenty years, these substances could only be
considered as metallic oxides, in a theoretical
light founded on analogy. It was not till
eighteen hundred and twenty-seven that a
German chemist, Wöhler, succeeded in
reducing them.

But within the course of the last two
years, in consequence of that first step, a
treasure has been divined, unearthed, and
brought to light, which it is as hard to believe
in as a prosaic fact, as it is to feel assured that
by descending through a trap-door in a ruined
vault, you will enter an Arabian Nights'
garden, wherein the leaves are emeralds and
the fruits on every tree are rubies, amethysts,
topazes, and carbuncles. What do you think
of a metal as white as silver, as unalterable
as gold, as easily melted as copper, as
tough as iron; which is malleable, ductile,
and with the singular quality of being
lighter than glass? Such a metal does
exist, and that in considerable quantities
on the surface of the globe. " Where?
From what distant region does it come?"
There is no occasion to hunt far and wide;
it is to be found everywhere, and
consequently in the locality which you honour
with your residence. More than that, you
do not want for it within-doors at home;
you touch it (not exactly by direct and simple
contact) several times in the day. The
poorest of men tramples it under his feet,
and is possessed of at least a few samples of
it. The metal, in fact, in the form of an
oxide, is one of the main component elements
of clay; and as clays enter into the composition
of arable land, and are the material on
which the potter exerts his skill, every farmer
is a sort of miner or placer, and every broken
potsherd is an ingot in its way. Our
new-found metal is ALUMINIUM (of which alumina,
is the oxide), originally discovered by the
German chemist Wöhler.

Wöhler was inspired with the happy
thought of substituting a powerful chemical
effect to the action of the voltaic pile as a
means of extracting the earthy metals.
Potassium and sodium, the radical metals of
potash and soda, are of all metals those which
offer the most energetic chemical affinities.
It might, therefore, be fairly expected that,
by submitting to the action of potassium or
sodium one of the earthy compounds which
it was desired to reduce to its elements, the
potassium would destroy the combination,
and would set free the new metal which was
being sought in its isolated state. The
experiment justified the expectation. In order
to obtain metallic aluminium, M. Wöhler
employed the compound which results from
the union of that metal with chlorine; that
is to say, chloride of aluminium. At the
bottom of a porcelain crucible he placed
several fragments of potassium, and, upon
them, a nearly equal volume of chloride of
aluminium. The crucible was placed over a
spirit-of-wine lamp, and was continued there,
until the action in the crucible was quite
complete. Uuder these conditions, the chloride
of aluminium was entirely decomposed;
in consequence of its superior affinity, the potassium
drove the aluminium from its combination with
the chlorine, and laid hold of the latter
substance, to form chloride of potassium, leaving
the aluminium free in a metallic state. As
chloride of potassium is a salt which is soluble
in water, it suffices to plunge the crucible
in water; the aluminium then .appears in a
state of liberty. The metal thus isolated
presented itself as a grey powder, capable of
assuming metallic brightness under friction;
but, according to M. Wöhler, it refused to
melt even at the highest temperature, and
was essentially oxidisable. Other earthy
metals were similarly obtained; all general
surmises respecting their properties proved
deceptive: the only point they possessed in