Read "Bouvard and Pecuchet, Volume IX" by Gustave Flaubert online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In order to understand chemistry they procured Regnault's course of lectures, and were, in the first place, informed that "simple bodies are perhaps compound. " They are divided into metalloids and metals -- a difference in which, the author observes, there is "nothing absolute. " So with acids and bases, "a body being able to behave in the manner of acids or of bases, according to circumstances."
The notation appeared to them irregular. The multiple proportions perplexed Pecuchet.