evaporates from your body
uses up a good deal of your heat.

[Illustration: FIG. 49. Diagram illustrating how in the evaporation of
water some of the molecules shoot off into the air.]

Gasoline evaporates more quickly than water. That is why your hands
become so cold when you get them wet with gasoline.

Since heat is required to evaporate a liquid, the quickest way to dry
anything is to warm it. That is why you hang clothes in the sun or by
the stove to dry.

Try these experiments:

EXPERIMENT 33. Read a thermometer that has been exposed to
the room air. Now dip it in water that is warmer than the
air, taking it out again at once. Watch the mercury. Does the
thermometer register a higher or a lower temperature than
it did at the beginning? What is taking up the heat from the
mercury?

EXPERIMENT 34. Put a few drops of water in each of two
evaporating dishes. Leave one cold; warm the other over the
burner, but do not heat it to boiling. Which evaporates more
quickly?

WHY THE SEA IS SALT. You remember various fairy stories about why the
sea is salt. For a long time the saltness of the sea puzzled people.
But the explanation is simple. As the water from the rains seeps
through the soil and rocks, it dissolves the salt in them and
continually carries some of it into the rivers. So the waters of the
rivers always carry a very little salt with them out to sea. The water
in the ocean evaporates and leaves the salt behind. For millions of
years this has been going on. So the rivers and lakes, which have only
a little salt in them, keep adding their small amounts to the sea, and
once in the sea the salt never can get out. The oceans never get any
fuller of water, because water only flows into the ocean as fast as it
evaporates from the ocean. Yet more salt goes into the ocean all the
time, washed down by thousands of streams and rivers. So little by
little the ocean has been growing more and more salty since the world
began.

[Illustration: FIG. 50. A view of the Dead Sea.]

Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea, unlike most lakes, have no rivers
flowing out of them to carry the salt and water away, but rivers flow
into them and bring along small amounts of salt all the time. Then the
water evaporates from Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea, leaving the
salt behind; and that is why they are so very salty.

When people want to get the salt out of sea water, they put the sea
water