If we turn to any of the special sciences the same dovetailing and over-lapping appear. In chemistry it is difficult to mark off any group of bodies from all other groups. The three sets of bodies that chemistry is supposed to study are elements, mixtures, and compounds. An _element_ such as carbon or gold, is a body which has not yet been decomposed. A _mixture_ is that which results from putting together two or more substances, without those substances undergoing any change of properties. Thus brandy and water, or gunpowder is a mixture. The properties of the brandy and of the water in the one case, and of the charcoal, nitre and sulphur in the other, are unchanged. A _compound_ is the result of the union of two or more elements with change of properties; thus water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and its properties are those of neither hydrogen nor oxygen. The fundamental distinction supposed to be at the basis of all chemical study, that between elements and compounds, is found to be inapplicable when we study such bodies as cyanogen, a compound of the two elements carbon and nitrogen, that behaves like an element. Ammonium, a compound of four atoms of hydrogen and one of nitrogen, also behaves like an element, taking the place of such metallic elements as potassium or sodium. In fact all the so-called "compound radicles" which enter so largely into our study of organic chemistry are groups of two or atoms of two or more elements that behave as simple bodies. The metals and the non-metals are connected by such forms as arsenic or selenium, placed by one chemist among the metals, by another among the non-metals. Hydrogen, usually classed with the non-metals, has the power of replacing metallic elements. It does this so persistently that, on theoretical grounds, chemists had long spoken of hydrogen as probably essentially a metal. When the French chemist Pictet succeeded in liquefying hydrogen, until then only known in the gas form, the liquid fell upon the floor of the laboratory with a metallic ring. And who is to say positively whether an alloy of copper and zinc is to be regarded as a mixture or as a compound of the two metals?