It would be interesting to know the sentiments of Lord Shelburne, then in the cold shade of retirement, as he perused these passages, and whether he realised the truth of the little homily from his “tame philosopher.”
The preface is followed by an introduction, in which Priestley gives a rapid and confessedly imperfect survey of the state of knowledge concerning “air” prior to 1774. He gives to Boyle the credit of first clearly recognising that elastic fluids exist differing essentially from the air of the atmosphere, but agreeing with it in the properties of weight, elasticity and transparency. But he also points out that two remarkable kinds of factitious air had long been known to miners, viz., choke damp, which is heavier than air, which lies at the bottom of pits, extinguishes flame and kills animals; and the other, called fire damp, which is lighter than common air, is found, therefore, near the roofs of subterraneous places and is liable to take fire and explode like gunpowder. “The word damp signifies vapour or exhalation in the German and Saxon languages.”
“Air of the former kind, besides having been discovered in various caverns, particularly the Grotta del Cane in Italy, had also been observed on the surface of fermenting liquors, and had been called gas (which is the same with geist, or spirit) by Van Helmont and other German chemists; but afterwards it obtained the name of fixed air, especially after it had been discovered by Dr Black of Edinburgh to exist, in a fixed state, in alkaline salts, chalk, and other calcareous substances.”
Black’s work is dealt with in half a dozen lines, and a passing reference is made to Macbride and Brownrigg. A very imperfect account is given of the work of Hales, although it is stated that “his experiments are so numerous and various that they are justly esteemed to be the solid foundation of all our knowledge of this subject.” This section concludes with the mention of Cavendish’s determinations of the relative weights of fixed air (carbon dioxide), and inflammable air from metals (hydrogen), and of Lane’s observations that water charged with carbonic acid will dissolve iron, “and thereby become a strong chalybeate.”
Priestley was the last man in the world to seek to disparage the work of his predecessors or to minimise what was due to them. In reality he had the intention, as he distinctly states, to write at his leisure the history and present state of discoveries relating to air, in a manner similar to his History of Electricity, and of the Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours, when no doubt he would have done full justice to all concerned. In the meantime he gives only such particulars as are necessary, in his judgment, to the understanding of his own work.
The remaining section of the introduction deals with his method of experimenting and with the apparatus he employed. It is of historical interest as containing a description of that most useful article of chemical furniture, his well-known pneumatic trough. He explains its use and gives details of his modes of manipulation. What an advance these were in simplicity, ingenuity and convenience can only be fully realised by comparing his methods with those of Hales. Not the least of Priestley’s services to science were the improvements he effected in that section of operative chemistry which is concerned with the preparation, collection and storage of gaseous substances.
The main body of the volume is divided into two parts—the first dealing with observations made in and before 1772, the second with observations made in the year 1773 and in the beginning of 1774. In the outset Priestley finds himself at a disadvantage in regard to the only terms at that time in vogue for the factitious airs, viz., fixed, mephitic and inflammable, which, he rightly says, are not sufficiently characteristic and distinct. Strictly speaking, any two of these terms might be applied to any one of the “airs” then known. The inflammable air from metals, as well as choke damp, is noxious, and therefore mephitic, as is fixed air, and since the inflammable airs are, apparently, capable of being imbibed by certain substances they may equally be considered fixable. The term fixed air had, however, acquired a distinctive meaning, and rather than introduce a new term or change the signification of an old one, he would, with his contemporaries, restrict the term to the air which had been made the subject of Black’s memorable investigation. The first paper in this section deals with fixed air; it is practically a reprint of that in the Phil. Trans. and which has already been described in sufficient detail. In the course of his experiments he says he once thought that the readiest method of procuring fixed air, and in sufficient purity, would be to heat pounded lime-stone in a gun barrel, “making it pass through the stem of a tobacco pipe or a glass tube carefully luted to the orifice of it.”
“In this manner I found that air is produced in great plenty; but, upon examining it, I found to my great surprise that little more than one half of it was fixed air, capable of being absorbed by water; and that the rest was inflammable, sometimes very weakly, but sometimes pretty highly so.”
He surmised that this “air” must come from the iron, and yet, he noted, it differed from the ordinary inflammable air from iron by the remarkable blue colour of its flame, and he concludes that “this inflammable principle may come from some remains of the animals from which it is thought that all calcareous matter proceeds.” Priestley, we now know, had incidentally converted some of the fixed air into the only other oxide of carbon, but he failed to appreciate the significance of his observation, and the credit of the discovery of carbon monoxide belongs to Cruikshank.
In his next paper on “Air in which Candles have burned,” Priestley made a discovery of the very highest importance. He had attempted to verify without success the allegation by the Count de Saluce, made in the memoirs of the Philosophical Society of Turin, that air vitiated by the combustion of candles could be restored by exposure to cold.