568  Romance  of  Chemical  Elements.    {AAU£St"  iP9hi8rm' 
Platinum. 
We  come  now  to  the  time  following  the  discovery  of  America, 
when  the  Spaniards  began  to  explore  the  New  World  and  to  look 
there  for  mysterious  treasures.  Some  of  the  early  adventurers  no- 
ticed in  the  gold  fields  of  some  southern  American  districts  a  white 
metal  associated  with  gold,  which  looked  like  silver,  but  was  not 
silver,  and  which  they  called  platina,  being  the  diminutive  of  the 
Spanish  "plata"  silver.  Antonio  de  Ulloa  travelling  in  1735  in 
Peru  refers  in  his  accounts  to  this  platinum.  In  1741  some  of  these 
grains  were  brought  to  England  by  Charles  Wood  from  the  gold 
mines  of  Choco  in  Peru,  and  in  1750  Sir  William  Watson  described 
it  as  a  new  metal. 
Nickel. 
Manifold  were  the  dangers  to  the  old  miners,  for  they  had  not 
only  to  encounter  bad  goblins,  but  even  the  devil  himself.  One  of 
these  devilish  ores  was  called  by  the  Germans  kupfernickel,  for  it 
looked  like  a  copper  ore,  but  on  roasting  it  released  poisonous 
arsenic  fumes.  So  the  name  given  to  it  was  nickel,  meaning  the 
devil  (its  milder  form  in  German  necken  =  to  annoy,  to  tease,  com- 
pare also  nickname).  It  was  in  1751  that  a  Swedish  chemist,  A.  F. 
Cronstedt,  examined  this  koppernickel  and  isolated  a  new  metal, 
which  he  termed  nickel  from  the  mineral. 
Founding  of  Chemistry. 
We  come  now  to  the  founding  of  the  new  chemistry,  which  was 
accomplished  by  the  discovery  of  several  gaseous  elements,  e.  g., 
hydrogen,  nitrogen  and  oxygen.  During  the  previous  time  the 
"  phlogiston  "  theory  had  developed,  that  is,  combustion  was  thought 
to  be  the  separation  of  some  element,  the  phlogiston,  from  the  burn- 
ing substance,  for  one  could  see  in  the  smoke  and  fumes  the  phlogis- 
ton "  going  off  "  and  leaving  the  substance.  When  oxygen  was  dis- 
covered it  was  thought  to  be  "  dephlogisticated  air,"  chlorine  was 
"  dephlogisticated  muriatic  acid,"  nitrogen  was  "  mephistic  air  "  or 
"phlogistic  air." 
Hydrogen. 
The  first  of  these  gases  to  be  discovered  was  hydrogen,  which 
was  isolated  in  1766  by  H.  Cavendish  by  the  action  of  acids  upon 
