Bismuth compounds elemental chlorine

Many elements such as tin, copper, zinc, lead, mercury, silver, platinum, antimony, arsenic, and gold, which are so essential to our needs and civilization, are among some of the rarest elements in the earth s crust. These are made available to us only by the processes of concentration in ore bodies. Some of the so-called rare-earth elements have been found to be much more plentiful than originally thought and are about as abundant as uranium, mercury, lead, or bismuth. The least abundant rare-earth or lanthanide element, thulium, is now believed to be more plentiful on earth than silver, cadmium, gold, or iodine, for example. Rubidium, the 16th most abundant element, is more plentiful than chlorine while its compounds are little known in chemistry and commerce. 

In the first section of this chapter some of the properties of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, bismuth, oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine are described. The following sections are devoted to some of their compounds with one another, especially the single-bonded normal-valence compounds. Compounds of nonmetals with oxygen are discussed in the following chapter. 

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