Page:On the various forces of nature and their relations to each other.djvu/87

Rh out; and if I had time, I could have shewn you a vessel with the top, bottom, and sides altogether formed like a sieve, and yet it would hold water, owing to this cohesion.

You have now seen that the solid water can become fluid by the addition of heat, owing to this lessening the attractive force between its particles, and yet you see that there is a good deal of attractive force remaining behind. I want now to take you another step beyond. We saw that if we continued applying heat to the water (as indeed happened with our piece of ice here), that we did at last break up that attraction which holds the liquid together; and I am about to take some ether (any other liquid would do, but ether makes a better experiment for my purpose), in order to illustrate what will happen when this cohesion is broken up. Now, this liquid ether, if exposed to a very low temperature, will become a solid; but if we apply heat to it, it becomes vapour, and I want to shew you the enormous bulk of the substance in this new form—when we make ice into water, we lessen its bulk, but when we convert water into steam, we increase it to an enormous