WEST OXFORD SOCIETY. 2g5 



the wider your sphere of thought and action will be. The honey- 

 bee, by instinct, can build a six-sided cell, and no other ; but did 

 that bee possess reason and education, like you, it might build it a 

 thousand ways. Says some writer, '' Liebig, the agricultural chem-' 

 ist, has enabled England to add millions of bushels annually to her 

 crop of wheat." Should a farmer expend one thousand dollars in 

 building a house, sucb as wag built fifty years ago, his neighbors 

 would pronounce him a foolish man, because houses are everywhere 

 built at the present day warmer, much more convenient and durable 

 than formerly, and all this in accordance with true science. 



There is hardly a domestic duty in the family in which you are 

 not performing some chemical experiment. When you make your 

 soap, you put quicklime with your ashes. Chemistry tells you it ia 

 to make your ley caustic and capable of combining with animal fats. 

 Common salt enters into the composition of our bodies. Hence we 

 give it to our animals, as well as take it ourselves. You expose 

 your sweet cider to the atmosphere to absorb oxygen, and it becomes 

 vinegar. You place a pail or tub of cold water in your cellar to 

 prevent it from freezing. Chemistry tells you that the water gives 

 out heat. Experience shows that a soup tastes better .the second 

 day than the first, and chemisty tells you that repeated heating and 

 cooling of animal matter renders it more soluble. The old coupletj 



Bean porridge hot, bean porridge cold, 

 Bean porridge best when nine dajs old, 



was founded in truth oh the same principle. 



You know that vinegar, put into a copper kettle, generate? a 

 poison. You create a green chemical salt known as acetate of cop- 

 per, a dangerous poison. You place plaster of Paris in your ma- 

 nure heap to arrest fermentation. Chemistry tells you that you 

 save the ammonia, or hartshorn, that would otherwise escape, and 

 which is a most powerful part of manure. The churning of butter, 

 the making of cheese, the smoking of your hams for bacon, and a 

 thousand other little things of every day life depend on a knowledge 

 of this science. 



Did time allow, I could fill up the hour allotted me in noticing the 

 daily experiments in the household and on the farm. The truth is, 

 you have been practicing Chemistry all your lives long, and just in 

 proportion as jou think, so will you in truth become real chemists 

 ia everything. 



