TO THE FARMER. 7 



and, as if the grave-diggers of nature, accomplish the 

 fulfilment of the old truism, " What is of the earth 

 shall again return to earth." 



If we, moreover, but look around within the nar- 

 row circle of our every-day life, we shall be reminded 

 almost at every glance, by our necessities a"nd occu- 

 pations, of the beneficial fruits of chemistry. The 

 clothing which we wear has been finished by its 

 instrumentality; by which we mean not to assert 

 that the tailor, who made our coat, was himself a 

 chemist, but that the cloth was bleached, dyed, and 

 dressed by chemical processes. The soap with 

 which we cleanse our skin is a chemical prepara- 

 tion ; the fire from which we gather warmth, and 

 the light wherewith we illuminate our evenings, are 

 both produced by chemical action. 



Chemistry, then, proposes to ascertain the way 

 and manner in which chemical changes take place, 

 the cause of their occurrence, and the laws in con- 

 formity with which they happen. To effect these 

 objects, it must previously learn of what those 

 bodies, whose changes it desires to investigate, are 

 composed ; it therefore resolves, decomposes, or ana- 

 lyzes them, and thereby arrives at the knowledge of 

 their constituent elements. For this reason it was 

 formerly called the Art of Analysis (Scheidekunst, 

 separating art). The simple bodies or substances 

 thus discovered, which could be decomposed no fur- 

 ther by any known method of analysis, received the 

 name of chemical elements, or elementary substances. 



