What is water?

If a schoolboy asked this question, you would answer it easily enough. "Why, water is a liquid found in and around the earth. Water is the sea, lakes, streams, springs and what comes gushing out of the tap when we turn it on." If he still looks a little unsatisfied, you would explain that our bodies are three-fourths water, and that water covers threefourths of the earth's surface. But you would have to admit to yourself that these facts, interesting as they are, do not quite answer the boy's question: "What is water?"