WHAT IS AN ELEMENT? 



IT was for long held that things around us, animals, 

 vegetables, stones, or liquids, partook of the properties of 

 one or more of the elements Fire, Air, Earth, or Water. 

 The doctrine was a very ancient one; it probably 

 originated in India; it reached our forefathers through 

 the Greeks. Fire was supposed to be ' hot and dry ' ; air, 

 ' hot and moist ' ; water, ' cold and moist ' ; and earth, 

 'cold and dry.' And substances which partook of such 

 qualities were supposed to contain appropriate amounts 

 of the elements, which conferred on them these pro- 

 perties. 



But in the reign of Charles n. of England, about the 

 year 1660, ^Robert Boyle, an English philosopher and 

 chemist, restored to the word element the meaning which 

 its derivation implies. ' Element,' or elemens in Latin, is 

 supposed to be derived from the three letters L M N ; and 

 to denote that, as a word is composed of letters, so a com- 

 pound is composed of elements. Boyle, in his celebrated 

 work The Sceptical Chymist, restricted the use of the 

 word element to the constituent of a compound ; and 

 that is the meaning which is still attached to the 

 term. 



It has often been asked : Does a compound contain an 

 element ? Are the elements actually in the compound ? 

 If this means, for example, that iron is present as iron in 



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