Peter Atkins

"It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason — to discover this reduction of the world to it…"

"I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxta…"

"The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shor…"

"This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions , yet it accounts f…"

"The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the land…"

"Chemistry is the science of matter and the changes it can undergo. The world of chemistry therefore embraces everything material around us—the stones we stand on, the food we eat, the flesh we are mad…"