The story of the chemical elements / by M.M. Pattison Muir.

  • Muir, M. M. Pattison (Matthew Moncrieff Pattison), 1848-1931.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The story of the chemical elements / by M.M. Pattison Muir. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ipart of the sweet juice which exudes is boiled away ssugar remains. In the living laboratories of other jplants are produced, from materials the same as, (or very like, those that the sugar-cane changes iinto sugar, dye stuffs such as madder and indigo, tor sweet-smelling resins such as frankincense ; and myrrh, or essential oils as cedarwood oil, oil of bergamot, and attar of roses, or gums as : gum tragacanth and gum arabic, or such things as guttapercha and indiarubber, or substances such as quinine, morphine, and salicylic acid that afford some relief to those who suffer pain. Most of the substances that are used as human food are the products of changes that occur in those living organisms, plants and animals. The plants absorb comparatively simple substances from the air and the soil, and from these they build up more complex things such as starch and sugar; plants are eaten by animals which carry further the building up processes that the plants began; and both vegetable and animal substances are consumed by man and are changed into the highly complex materials that form the organism which is for ever synthesising itself from simpler kinds of matter, and is constantly being resolved into less complex forms of substance. The manufacturing industries are so many examples of the intelligent direction to definite ends of changes in material things. Iron ore is brought in the blast furnace under such condi- tions that the red earthy stone is converted into lumps of cast iron; and when this iron is melted and air is blown into the fluid mass it undergoes another transmutation into hard, lustrous, made-