For example we can determine that wood is mostly brown thereby detecting its property of color several properties are considered to be essential and those are most often divided into physical and chemical properties we also differentiate between extensive and intensive properties of matter physical properties are those that can be measured or observed without changing the chemical . A property is a member that provides a flexible mechanism to read write or compute the value of a private field properties can be used as if they are public data members but they are actually special methods called accessors this enables data to be accessed easily and still helps promote the safety and flexibility of methods