Works Author:Gustave Flaubert Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Amateur Chemists. i N ORDER to understand chemistry they procured Regnault's course of lectures, and were, in the first place, informed ... more »that "simple bodies are ' perhaps compound." They are di- 'vided into metalloids and metals — a difference in which, the author observes, there is "nothing absolute." So with acids and bases, "a body being able to behave in the manner of acids or of bases, according to circumstances." The notation appeared to them irregular. The multiple proportions perplexed P6cuchet. "Since one molecule of a, I suppose, is combined with several particles of b, it seems to me that this molecule ought to be divided into as many particles; but, if it is divided, it ceases to be unity, the primordial molecule. In short, I do not understand." "No more do I," said Bouvard. And they had recourse to a work less difficult, that of Girardin, from which they acquired the certainty that ten litres of air weigh a hundred grammes, that lead does not go into pencils, and that the diamond is only carbon. What amazed them above all is that the earth, as an element, does not exist. They grasped the working of straw, gold, silver, the lye-washing of linen, the tinning of saucepans; then, without the least scruple, Bouvard and P6cuchet launched into organic chemistry. What a marvel to find again in living beings the same substances of which the minerals are composed! Nevertheless they experienced a sort of humiliation at the idea that their own personality contained phosphorus, like matches; albumen, like the whites of eggs; and hydrogen gas, like street-lamps. i After colours and oily substances came the turn of/ fermentation. This brought them to acids — and the law of equivalents once more confused them. They tried to elucidate it by m...« less