THE ROMANCE OF CHEMISTRY 



WHEN we first visit a great museum we are impressed by 

 the multitude of different kinds of things: these thou- 

 sands of startlingly different species of animals each 

 itself, and no other these hundreds of different kinds of wood, 

 shelf after shelf of minerals, an Aladdin's cave of precious stones, 

 besides all manner of things artificially made, such as alloys and 

 fabrics, drugs and preserved foods. Some of the objects we see 

 may fade into one another, but what almost embarrasses us is the 

 number of things that are quite distinctive. We get the same 

 impression of diversity when we take a walk in the country, or 

 when we see a dredge or a trawl brought up on deck. 



Shuffling the Chemical Cards 



Now a kindly curator in the museum might take us to the 

 bird-cases, for instance, and show that, after all, the diversity was 

 in great part due to different shufflings of a not very large pack 

 of cards. There are thousands of tunes, but there are not many 

 notes. He might take us to the case of minerals, where, by our- 

 selves, we got the impression of overwhelming and baffling variety, 

 and show us that a comparatively small number of really different 

 things may be shuffled into a multitude of diversities. A small 

 cast of players may form a great variety of different tableaux. 



There might be in the museum a case showing a sheet of 

 parchment-paper, a slab cut out of a tree, a wooden pot full of 

 glue, a cork for the same, a piece of india-rubber for erasures, a 

 celluloid beaker full of water, a "lead" pencil, a vulcanite pen- 



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