brous when tenacity, and crystalline when hardness is required. Its
variety of transformations is something wonderful. Meeting iron, or even
iron at its best in the form of steel, in the same field, it easily
vanquishes it at every point. It melts at 1,300 degrees F., or at least
600 degrees below the melting point of iron, and it neither oxidizes in
the atmosphere nor tarnishes in contact with gases. The enumeration of
the properties of aluminum is as enchanting as the scenes of a fairy
tale.

Before proceeding further with this new wonder of science, which is
already knocking at our doors, a brief sketch of its birth and
development may be fittingly introduced. The celebrated French chemist
Lavoisier, a very magician in the science, groping in the dark of the
last century, evolved the chemical theory of combustion--the existence
of a "highly respirable gas," oxygen, and the presence of metallic bases
in earths and alkalies. With the latter subject we have only to do at
the present moment. The metallic base was predicted, yet not identified.
The French Revolution swept this genius from the earth in 1794, and
darkness closed in upon the scene, until the light of Sir Humphry Davy's
lamp in the early years of the present century again struck upon the
metallic base of certain earths, but the reflection was so feeble that
the great secret was never revealed. Then a little later the Swedish
Berzelius and the Danish Oersted, confident in the prediction of
Lavoisier and of Davy, went in search of the mysterious stranger with
the aggressive electric current, but as yet to no purpose. It was
reserved to the distinguished German Wohler, in 1827, to complete the
work of the past fifty years of struggle and finally produce the minute
white globule of the pure metal from a mixture of the chloride of
aluminum and sodium, and at last the secret is revealed--the first step
was taken. It took twenty years of labor to revolve the mere discovery
into the production of the aluminum bead in 1846, and yet with this
first step, this new wonder remained a foetus undeveloped in the womb of
the laboratory for years to come.

Returning again to France some time during the years between 1854 and
1858, and under the patronage of the Emperor Napoleon III., we behold
Deville at last forcing Nature to yield and give up this precious
quality as a manufactured product. Rose, of Berlin, and Gerhard, in
England, pressing hard upon the heels of the French