An Outline of Mineralogy and Geology Author:William Phillips General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1826 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: OF THE METALS. The only metals known to the ancients were gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and mercury ; but discoveries have from time to time increased the catalogue, until it has been swelled to the number of twenty-eight, independently of such of the bases of some of the earths and alkalies as may hereafter be found to agree in characters with the metals. Of these metals twelve only have the important property of malleability, or of being sufficiently tenacious to bear the extension of their body by beating with the hammer; the others have by some been therefore termed brittle metals, Malleable Metals, Brittle Metals. A lustre is peculiar to the metals, which therefore is called the metallic lustre: another remarkable property is their want of transparency when in the mass ; but as leaf gold, which may be beaten into leaves so thin that they will float in the air like a feather, when held between the eye and a luminous body, transmits a green light, and silver a white light, it seems probable that other metals, if attenuated in the same degree, would also be translucent. In weight, the foregoing metals far exceed the earths; the heaviest of the earths is only about four times heavierthan water, but the lightest of the metals is more than six times heavier than water. Beaten gold is nineteen times heavier than water, and beaten platina, the heaviest of all, is twenty-three times heavier than water. The characters of fusibility and extensibility in metals is of vast importance to man ; for without these characters neither eguld they be freed from the earths and other impurities with which...« less