1. It did not combine with water by agitation.
2. It did not precipitate lime-water.
3. It did not unite with fixed or volatile alkalies.
4. It did not at all diminish their caustic quality.
5. It would serve again for the calcination of metals.
6. It was diminished like common air by addition of one-third of nitrous gas.
7. It had none of the properties of carbonic acid gas. Far from being fatal, like that gas, to animals, it seemed on the contrary more proper for the purposes of respiration. Candles and burning bodies were not only not extinguished by it, but burned with an enlarged flame in a very remarkable manner. The light they gave was much greater and clearer than in common air.
He expresses his opinion that the same kind of air would be obtained by heating nitre without addition, and this opinion is founded on the fact that when nitre is detonated with charcoal it gives out abundance of carbonic acid gas.
Thus Lavoisier shows in this paper that the kind of air which unites with metals during their calcination is purer and fitter for combustion than common air. In short it is the gas which Dr. Priestley had discovered in 1774, and which is now known by the name of oxygen gas.
This Memoir deserves a few animadversions. Dr. Priestley discovered oxygen gas in August, 1774; and he informs us in his life, that in the autumn of that year he went to Paris and exhibited to Lavoisier, in his own laboratory the mode of obtaining oxygen gas by heating red oxide of mercury in a gun-barrel, and the properties by which this gas is distinguished—indeed the very properties which Lavoisier himself enumerates in his paper. There can, therefore, be no doubt that Lavoisier was acquainted with oxygen gas in 1774, and that he owed his knowledge of it to Dr. Priestley.