Refer to the note after 1047, Series viii.—Dec. 1838.
I find (since making and describing these results,) from a note to Sir Humphry Davy's paper in the Philosophical Transactions, 1807, p. 31, that that philosopher, in repeating Wollaston's experiment of the decomposition of water by common electricity (327. 330.) used an arrangement somewhat like some of those I have described. He immersed a guarded platina point connected with the machine in distilled water, and dissipated the electricity from the water into the air by moistened filaments of cotton. In this way he states that he obtained oxygen and hydrogen separately from each other. This experiment, had I known of it, ought to have been quoted in an earlier series of these Researches (342.); but it does not remove any of the objections I have made to the use of Wollaston's apparatus as a test of true chemical action (331.).
Elements of Chemical Philosophy, p. 160, &c.
Ibid. pp. 144, 145.
Journal of the Royal Institution, 1802, p. 53.
Philosophical Transactions, 1826, p. 406.
Philosophical Transactions, 1826, p. 406.
Annales de Chimie, 1806, tom, lviii. p. 64.
Ibid. pp. 66, 67, also tom. lxiii. p. 20.
Ibid. tom. lviii. p. 68, tom, lxiii. p. 20.