345. There can remain no doubt that the property of inducing combination, which can thus be conferred upon masses of platina and other metals by connecting them with the poles of the battery, or by cleansing processes either of a mechanical or chemical nature, is the same as that which was discovered by Dobereiner,[1] in 1823, to belong in so eminent a degree to spongy platina, and which was afterwards so well experimented upon and illustrated by MM. Dulong and Thenard,[2] in 1823. The latter philosophers even quote experiments in which a very fine platina wire, which had been coiled up and digested in nitric, sulphuric, or muriatic acid, became ignited when put into a jet of hydrogen gas.[3] This effect I can now produce at pleasure with either wires or plates by the processes described (306, 337, 341); and by using a smaller plate cut so that it shall rest against the glass by a few points, and yet allow the water to flow off (fig. 19), the loss of heat is less, the metal is assimilated somewhat to the spongy state, and the probability of failure almost entirely removed.
Fig. 19.
346. M. Dobereiner refers the effect entirely to an electric action. He considers the platina and hydrogen as forming a voltaic element of the ordinary kind, in which the hydrogen, being very highly positive, represents the zinc of the usual arrangement, and like it, therefore, attracts oxygen and combines with it.[4]
347. In the two excellent experimental papers by MM. Dulong and Thenard,[5] those philosophers show that elevation of temperature favours the action, but does not alter its character; Sir Humphry Davy's incandescent platina wire being the same phenomenon with Dobereiner's spongy platina. They show that all metals have this power in a greater or smaller degree, and that it is even possessed by such bodies as charcoal, pumice, porcelain, glass, rock-crystal, etc., when their temperatures are raised; and that another of Davy's effects, in which oxygen and hydrogen had combined slowly together at a heat below ignition, was really dependent upon the property of the
