This view of chemistry carries it as a science beyond the mere holiday amusement we frequently take it to be. It is a grand study, a study for a lifetime. Nature is always willing, like a kind, good mother as she is, to render us up her secrets if we inquire respectfully and lovingly. The more we inquire the more we shall find we have to learn. In these and the following pages we can only tell you a few things, but no one need be turned away because he does not find all he wants. We never do get all we want in life, and there are many first-rate men—scientists—who would give “half their kingdom” for a certain bit of knowledge concerning some natural phenomena. There are numerous excellent treatises on chemistry, and exhaustive as they are, at present they do not tell us all. Let these popular pages lead us to the study of nature, and we shall find our labour far from onerous and full of interest, daily increasing to the end, when we shall know no more of earth, or chemistry. As a preliminary we will put our workshop aside, and show you something of _Chemistry without a Laboratory_. CHAPTER XXV. CHEMISTRY WITHOUT A LABORATORY. We have already pointed out the possibility of going through a course of physics without any special apparatus, we shall now endeavour to show our readers the method of performing some experiments in chemistry without a laboratory, or at any rate with only a few simple and inexpensive appliances. The preparation of gases, such as hydrogen, carbonic acid, and oxygen, is very easily accomplished, but we shall here point out principally a series of experiments that are not so much known. We will commence, for example, by describing an interesting experiment which often occurs in a course of chemistry. Ammoniacal gas combined with the elements of water is analogous to a metallic oxide which includes a metallic root, _ammonium_. This hypothetically composed metal may be in a manner perceived, since it is possible to amalgamate it with mercury by operating in the following manner:—We take a porcelain mortar, in which we pour a quantity of mercury, and then cut some thin strips of sodium, which are thrown into the mercury. By stirring it about with the pestle a loud cracking is produced, accompanied by a flame, which bears evidence to the union of the mercury and the sodium, and the formation of an amalgam of sodium. If this amalgam of sodium is put into a slender glass tube containing a concentrated solution of hydrochlorate of ammonia in water, we see the ammonia expand in an extraordinary manner, and spout out from the end of the tube, which is now too small to contain it, in the form of a metallic substance (fig. 302). In this case, the ammonium, the radical which exists in the ammoniacal salts, becomes amalgamated with the mercury, driving out the sodium with which it had previously been combined; the ammonium thus united with the mercury becomes decomposed