The Magician's Own Book, or, the Whole Art of Conjuring / Being a complete hand-book of parlor magic, and containing over one thousand optical, chemical, mechanical, magnetical, and magical experiments, amusing transmutations, astonishing sleights and subtleties, celebrated card deceptions, ingenious tricks with numbers, curious and entertaining puzzles, together with all the most noted tricks of modern performers.

by George Arnold; Frank Cahill

1. Triturate together in a dry mortar a few grains of flowers of sulphur, with a small quantity of the chlorate of potash, and a succession of sharp explosions, like the crack of a whip, will be produced.

2. Substitute half a grain of phosphorus for the sulphur, and the action will be much more violent. The hand should be defended by a thick glove, and the eyes carefully guarded, in making this experiment.

3. Mix very carefully a little of this salt, reduced to powder, with a little lump sugar, also powdered, and drop on the mixture a little strong sulphuric acid, and it will instantly burst into a flame. This experiment also requires caution.

Want of space precludes us from considering the individual metals and their compounds in detail; it must suffice to describe some experiments, showing some of their properties.

The different affinities of the metals for oxygen, may be exhibited in various ways. The silver or zinc tree has already been described.

EXPERIMENTS.

1. Into a solution of nitrate of silver, in distilled water, immerse a clean plate or slip of copper. The solution, which was colorless, will soon begin to assume a greenish tint, and the piece of copper will be covered with a coating of a light gray color, which is the silver formerly united to the nitric acid, which has been displaced by the greater affinity or liking of the oxygen and acid for the copper.

2. When the copper is no longer coated, but remains clean and bright when immersed in the fluid, all the silver has been deposited, and the glass now contains a solution of copper.

Place a piece of clean iron in the solution, and it will almost instantly be coated with a film of copper, and this will continue until the whole of that metal is removed, and its place filled by an equivalent quantity of iron, so that nitrate of iron is found in the liquid. The oxygen and nitric acid remain unaltered in quantity or quality during these changes, being merely transferred from one metal to another.

A piece of zinc will displace the iron in like manner, leaving a solution of nitrate of zinc.