 What's stuff made of? If I give you a piece of wood, how do you know what it's made of? Or if I give you a piece of metal, how could you decide what it's made of? In this section, what we want to do is to figure out what early scientists did to figure out what makes up matter. If we took this piece of copper and we cut it into tinier and tinier pieces, looked at under microscope, and the smallest piece we could get, what would it look like? What's its properties? What about glass? Is that an element or is that a compound and what is an element or a compound? What about the foods we eat? Is it apple and potato? Are they made of elements like the copper? Are they composed of lots of different kinds of atoms, elements, compounds? In this section, we want you to read carefully and see what early scientists had to do in order to solve these questions. And at the end you should be able to understand the role that a scientist plays in making discoveries.