If bismuth turned into mercury, what would mercury turn into?
There would be no rest for me until I had solved the question.

I renewed the exhausted batteries and passed the current through the bowl of quicksilver.

For sixteen hours I sat watching the metal, marking how it slowly seemed to curdle, to grow firmer, to lose its silvery glitter and to take a dull yellow hue.

When I at last picked it up in a forceps, and threw it upon the table, it had lost every characteristic of mercury, and had obviously become another metal.

A few simple tests were enough to show me that this other metal was platinum.
"Now, to a chemist, there was something very suggestive in the order in which these changes had been effected.