You found that things burned brilliantly in oxygen. Well, things burn in air too, because a fifth of the air is oxygen and the oxygen of the air has all its original properties left. Things do not burn as brightly in air as they do in pure oxygen for the same reason that a teaspoonful of sugar mixed with 4 teaspoonfuls of boiled rice does not taste as sweet as pure sugar. The sugar itself is as sweet, but it is not as concentrated. Likewise the oxygen in the air is as able to help things burn as pure oxygen is; but it is diluted with four times its own volume of nitrogen. A solution is a mixture, too; for although substances disappear when they dissolve, they keep their own properties. Sugar is sweet whether it is dissolved or not. Salt dissolved in water makes brine; but the water will act in the way that it did before. It will still help to make iron rust; and salt will be salty, whether or not it is dissolved in water. That is why solutions are only mixtures and are not chemical compounds. EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS MADE OF ATOMS. Everything in the world is either an element or a compound or a mixture. Most plant and animal matter is made of very complicated compounds, or mixtures of compounds. All pure metals are elements; but metals, when they are melted, can be dissolved in each other to form alloys, which really are mixtures. Most of the so-called gold and silver and nickel articles are really made of alloys; that is, the gold, silver, or nickel has some other elements dissolved in it to make it harder, or to impart some other quality. Bronze and brass are always alloys; steel is generally an alloy made chiefly of iron but with other elements such as tungsten, of which electric lamp filaments are made, dissolved in it to make it harder. An alloy is a special kind of solution not quite like an ordinary solution. You remember that in the opening chapters we often spoke of molecules, the tiny particles of matter that are always moving rapidly back and forth. Well, if you were to examine a molecule of water with the microscope which we imagined could show us molecules, you would find that the molecule of water was made of three still smaller particles, called _atoms_. Two of these would be atoms of hydrogen and would probably be especially small; the third would be larger and would be an oxygen atom. In the same way if you looked at a _molecule_ of salt under this imaginary microscope, you would probably find it made of _two atoms_, one of sodium (Na) and one of chlorine (Cl), held fast together in some way which we do not entirely understand. The smallest particle of an _element_ is called an _atom_. The smallest particle of a _compound_ is called a _molecule_. Molecules are usually made of two or more atoms joined together. _APPLICATION 68._ In the following list tell which things are elements, which are compounds, and which are mixtures, remembering that both solutions and alloys are mixtures: